DAVID ADAMO

Posted on 2012-12-31

One part of Adamo’s conceptual stance is to question the meaningfulness of objects and the ways in which we come to understand them, through playfully transforming materials and subverting their intended use and more recently, by their amplifications and reduction.

David Adamo’s current work involves the transformation of objects from everyday culture such as bicycles, doors and musical instruments. By way of these transformations, Adamo not only subverts the object’s intended use, but also plays with their size and material. On the ground floor of the gallery, the artist has arranged a row of replica pencil erasers lined up on a long single shelf. These pencil erasers are made from clay and hand-painted so that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. Elsewhere a bicycle frame has been crafted out of wood, the rendering of a generic and practical object into a lavish but non-functioning one. This particular bicycle is taken from the design of Graeme Obree, which he called the “Old Faithful”, a radically designed bicycle which included parts from a washing machine. The original bicycle is displayed in the Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow..

A thread running through Adamo’s practice is the narrative of the artist as a performer, as if the act of making is a staged and choreographed activity. The works in the show point to a fantastical narrative to what could have occurred previously or is about to happen in order for this arrangements of objects to have come about. In Untitled, a replica door of a typical European grand entrance-way is installed into the gallery wall, but it is brought down to 1:2 of the scale and the original more subtle tones of a Prussian street are replaced by a bright orange paint.

Opposite – Untitled, 2012

Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013

Ibid.
35 Hoxton Square
London
N1 6NN

ibidprojects.com

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BERNARD PIFFARETTI – REPORT

Posted on 2012-12-31

For more than 30 years Piffaretti has expressed the virtues and contradictions of painting, pairing codes of modern abstraction with a strict conceptual methodology. By vertically dividing the canvas into two equal halves creating the right-side as the original and the left-side its copy, Piffaretti has shaped his oeuvre into a multi-perplexing paradox that runs the gamut of painting’s canon while forming the quintessential Duchampian question to the audience.

The rigor and restraints of Bernard Piffaretti’s practice is riddled with the interruption, or pause, from its initiating mark, the formal constant of the painted-vertical line, that equally connects and separates the whole of the canvas. The paintings’ conception prompts a metaphorical plurality to the viewer on the creation of the pictorial image, the role of thinking in form, and the questions of negation and reaffirmation of the act of painting through the systematic role of copying to once more reveal what was already known. Unlike many of his contemporaries relaying on the power of the mechanical reproductive image, and the objective truth as presented in the photograph, Piffaretti posits himself into the endless variation of form as a traditional painter, acknowledging his strong conceptual threading, the thoughts within his paintings, and their relationship to space and time bearing the weight of the artist’s infinite dualities.

Opposite – Untitled, 2012

Exhibition runs January 12th to February 16th, 2013

Cherry and Martin
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA
90034

www.cherryandmartin.com

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JACKIE GENDEL – COMEDY OF MANNERS

Posted on 2012-12-31

Much of Gendel’s recent work makes contradictory use of two of modernity’s most common conventions of image production; she employs both serial repetition of form and the sequential image of narrative, using them simultaneously to unfold the implied relationship between narrative time and painterly process. This achieves a “Groundhog Day”-like effect in which a scene repeats albeit in slightly altered scenery, and increasingly nuanced but appreciable differences occur in the who, what, when, how, and ultimately, most importantly, “why”.

This peculiar take on the incremental space within and between paintings provides an unlikely connection between Gendel’s recent work and her early work derived from her background in underground comics, a medium of “sequential image” storytelling, which she drew in the late ‘90s for an upstart feminist webzine for teenage girls.

But her recent work is also equally established in her approach to easel painting, and specifically her play with the notion of character and historical time developed throughout her first exhibition of speculative portraits at the gallery in 2006, which the artist credits as an important turning point in her work, and has continued in various iterations since.

Opposite – Girls’ Room IV, 2011

Exhibition runs January 12th to February 9th, 2013

Jeff Bailey Gallery
625 W 27th St – Ground Floor
11th & 12 Ave
New York
NY
10001

www.baileygallery.com

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