JOSH REAMES & JOSE LERMA

Posted on 2016-02-22

Using the gallery as their studio during the month of January, Reames and Lerma have created a group of paintings and sculpture whose centerpiece is a pair of monumental paintings (composed of two triptychs) that measure 10 x 24 feet each (over 3 x 7 meters). It started with Josh Reames painting a single palm tree and quickly evolved into a metaphorical landscape inspired by the Cayman Inlands – a Caribbean paradise and tax haven with a history of piracy.

Responding instinctively to each other’s mark making and personal choices, this improvisational group portrait mixes the characteristic styles of 18th century political and social satire (James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson) with the artists’ bold, individual styles and penchant for visual satire among other iconography that characterizes their personal work.

Populated by the likenesses of persons who visited the artists during their residency – collectors, curators, museum directors, artists, students and the occasional passerby – the paintings employ the grand scale of European history painting, presenting a pseudo history through a chaotic, unorganized battle being waged in a 21st century virtual reality that references the world’s most notorious tax shelter.

In addition to these two central paintings, the artists have also collaborated on a sculptural installation featuring a mirrored door-cum-disco ball that plays with notions of access and reality. They have also contributed their own individual paintings and drawings.

Opposite – Untitled I, left panel, 2016

Exhibition runs through till March 5th, 2016

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.luisdejesus.com

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HENK STALLINGA – LEVITY

Posted on 2016-02-22

Stallinga is both a visual artist and a designer. Although he does not consider his product designs to be fine arts parts thereof are often transformed into conceptual multimedia installations and sculptures. A minimalistic visual language, light, sound and movement are recurring elements in them. The exhibition consists of the light installation Lumen Balance, the series Breathe In Breathe Out, wherein paintings are combined with lamps, and the installation A Couch to Match the Painting.

The concepts behind Stallinga’s works are often based on our awareness of the everyday world around us. This involves concepts like sense of time, sonorous and visual perception and experience of energy in the form of light, heat or movement. The observer is often left surprised or even optically deceived by Stallinga’s works in which everyday phenomena are presented in a different context.

Opposite – Breathe in, Breathe out

Exhibition runs through till March 11th, 2016

Gerhard Hofland
Bilderdijkstraat 165-C
NL 1053 KP Amsterdam
Netherlands

gerhardhofland.com

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PANOS PAPADOPOULOS

Posted on 2016-02-22

Panos Papadopoulos work is a mixture of conceptual, minimal, abstract and expressionist art. Departing from his earlier works – text-populated, noisy, post punk abstract oil paintings -, Papadopoulos here allows space to emerge, creating interiors and replacing the text with objects; yet the objects still hold on to their linguistic potency, often acting as symbols of language. It is the empty space, the sound of silence that adds tension to these objects. Basically, he turns drawings into paintings, leaving the viewer with the impression of the absent, the incomplete, the unfinished. Is their appearance deceiving; is there more than meets the eye?

“Often people ask me if my oil paintings are finished or why do they look so empty,” says the Athens-born painter. “My previous works of art were dense and intense; they had lots of layers and were full of text and information. So I started to abstract from the… abstract. I like to take advantage of the whiteness of the canvas in order to highlight the things that matter the most”. In his new works, he takes away the “noise” and a lot of other paint elements, in order to emphasize on the power of color and the brushstroke itself. “It is interesting to see how people react to minimal paintings, especially in a world were they are used to wanting more. But there is a lot of tense in the drawing and the color composition, you just have to look closer”, he explains.

The title of the exhibition “Narcissism-Masochism-Fetishism” is inspired by a collection of essays by Sigmund Freud. Those concepts are related to the thematic of the works and the process of their creation. The result is a series of interiors and urban environments, full of irony, humor and hidden meanings. The more you look at them, the more you see. White space does not necessary mean nothing; an empty space can produce strong presences and can create an effective impact on our senses. He provides an interesting counterpoint in his work by creating worlds bordering the real and the imagined, inspired from everyday life while his paintings function psychotherapeutically as a reflection on the personal experiences of the artist.

Opposite – “All the world’s a stage”, 2015

Exhibition runs through till March 19th, 2016

Eleni Koroneou Gallery
Dimofontos 30 & Thorikion 7
Thission
11851 Athens
Greece

www.koroneougallery.com

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BRIAN JUNGEN

Posted on 2016-02-15

Using new Air Jordan trainers, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015, Jungen returns to a material he is both familiar with and continues to experiment through. Adopting an alternative approach to dissecting and rearranging the material that was developed in earlier work, these new sculptures are produced using the same tools that were utilized to manufacture them: band saw, punches, rivets, drills and an industrial sewing machine, personalizing their industrial production.

As the shoes themselves have changed in terms of design and colour schemes over time, so has the artist’s strategy of using them as representational objects of colonial and First Nation art histories merging with contemporary collective imagery. These new works become more abstract and colorful, continuing to allow the material of the shoe itself to guide his decision about their form and assembly while pushing the possibilities of material depiction. Utilizing as much of the shoe as possible in their production, these objects minimize extraneous material and armatures and act as free standing sculptures.

The resulting works are less a direct representation and contain more a suggestion of animal and human faces, taking advantage of how we innately search for and recognize these particular patterns. This phenomena, oscillating between representation and abstraction, has historically been used in the visual representation of diverse mythologies. It could be argued that myths are always born from trauma and intertwine with the uncanny and supernatural, itself by definition unknown and indescribable. Considering our continued abstraction of faces and bodies through masks and dress, these works can be considered in direct relation to the diverse but unified aesthetics of contemporary global economic, political and cultural conflict.

Opposite – Broken Arrangement, 2016

Exhibition runs through till February 27th, 2016

Catriona Jeffries
274 East 1st Avenue
Vancouver
British Columbia
V5T 1A6 Canada

catrionajeffries.com

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SUZANNE TREISTER – HFT THE GARDENER

Posted on 2016-02-15

HFT The Gardener will feature artworks created by the fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a banker turned ‘outsider artist’.

At work one day Traumberg, a British high frequency trader (HFT), enters a semi-hallucinogenic state that alters his perceptions of the trading algorithms he is working with. Inspired by this experience, he starts to experiment with psychoactive drugs and explore the ethno-pharmacology of plants from which they are derived.

Utilizing the ancient Hebrew tradition of Gematria, which assigns a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet, Traumberg calculates the numerological equivalents of the botanical names of the psychoactive plants and cross-references them with companies in the FT Global 500 Financial Index. Pairing the botanical plants with the companies they correspond to on the FT Index, he spends his days creating groups of prints and drawings inspired by the work of Ernst Haekel which he had loved as a child, and of Adolf Wölfli, whose drawings he had more recently seen on a banking trip to Bern in Switzerland.

Released from his job in the city, Traumberg communes with the traditional shamanic users of the plants whose practices include healing, divining the future, entering the spirit world and exploring the hallucinatory nature of reality. He develops a fantasy of himself as a techno-shaman, transmuting the spirituality of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new art forms.

Opposite – HFT The Gardener / Botanical Prints / Rank 4: Google – US – Software & computer services, 2014-15

Exhibition runs through till March 12th, 2016

P.P.O.W
535 West 22nd Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

www.ppowgallery.com

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JUDITH BELZER

Posted on 2016-02-15

Belzer’s painting has long concerned itself with the uneasy relationship between the natural and commercial worlds, and she will often use the borderlands between the two as a motif. She adopts aerial perspectives, surveying the contested zones between back country, cultivated field, industry and the overlay of her own organizing principles. Her theme is not so much the encroachment of civilization as one finds in the pervasive brand-scape, but the crimping effect on worlds caught in the collision of economy and ecology. She paints with the critical eye of a journalist reporting back on the condition of an endangered habitat. She uses oil paint at times like watercolor and at times like colored pencil, folding her surfaces in ribbons of thin wash and sharply meandering line.

Exhibition runs through till April 9th, 2016

George Lawson Gallery
315 Potrero Avenue (at 16th St.)
San Francisco
CA 94103

www.georgelawsongallery.com

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