ANDISHEH AVINI

Posted on 2014-01-27

Andisheh Avini uses the subjective experience of his Iranian heritage as a platform from which to explore more collective notions of memory and the significance of imagery. Avini has reduced the appropriated image of the revolutionary figure to his eyes, and in doing so, uproots the image’s cultural specificity. Mysterious, menacing, and lofty, the series alludes to a child’s impressions of the world around him – gained both through empirical interaction and the mediation of popular culture. In turn, these images inspire the adult recollection of those early impressions.

Handmade in Iran, the panels that Avini uses as the support for these works are made to order, and their geometric designs are a highly recognizable and quotidian feature of Iranian culture. By painting over them, Avini uses the tight patterning and rigid, age-old tradition of these panels as a way to explore the liberated, gestural potential of painting. This visual interaction further suggests the artist’s own relationship to his cultural heritage and personal history, linked as it is to an historical moment whose regulated visual proscriptions are antithetical to the aesthetic possibilities within his life in New York. Sourcing bits and pieces of simple images – the curve of a lock of hair, for instance – Avini reduces them to their essential forms until their origin is diluted and the fluidity of paint is emphasized. In these palimpsestic hybrids, Avini’s overwriting obstructs and complicates the language of the traditional designs, both in a visual and conceptual sense.

Exhibition runs through to February 15th, 2014

Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
10011
New York
USA

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

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BERNARD FRIZE – HELLO MY NAME IS BERNARD FRIZE

Posted on 2014-01-27

As a new introduction to Mr. Frize, the exhibition reveals key facts about his work:

a. Mr. Frize’s paintings feature a spectrum of color, selected not for their specific qualities but selected because they are distinct from one another; selected simply to be a color, not to evoke a mood or make a statement in and of themselves.

b. Mr. Frize follows systematic procedures in executing his paintings, based on a pre-determined script he chooses which can do nothing once put in motion but veer pointedly towards disruption.

c. Mr. Frize provides a stage for chance and the nature of the materials to make their way, to have their influence. Paint, resin, color, weight of the brush, imprint of the paint, the choice to allow a freeness to the touch.

In “Diola” gesture is evident. There is a saturation of color at the top and bottom of the canvas, at the edges of the brushstrokes. Throughout the main field of the painting, color is also saturated at the edges of the brushstrokes, where the paint became ever so slightly heavier from the friction between the brush and the canvas. The material (paint) is doing what it does. Water, pigment, gravity, the effects of drying all have their influence and all play a part in what the painting becomes. It’s an organic process.

Exhibition runs through to March 1st, 2014

Galerie Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne
75003
Paris
France

www.perrotin.com

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