Art : EXIT

JEFF ELROD – ESP

Posted on 2014-11-03

An American abstract painter, Jeff Elrod employs both digital and manual processes in the different stages of his work to create paintings related to the computer aesthetics and imagery, representing since the early 1990’s a new singular position in abstract painting.

“I am a formalist painter. It’s always about the form, the composition. My task is to get the painting off the screen and onto the canvas (…) I’m very comfortable with the screen (…) for me, it’s a very natural way to draw. The space is a screen instead of a window”
J.E.

The title of the exhibition, ESP, can be read in some of the paintings. These three letters likely stand for “Extra Sensory Perception”. Using the computer instead of the hand during the first stages of the creative process, Elrod allows himself to engage his subconscious mind as “a digital breed of automatic writing”. ESP could also be the diminutive of EL ESPECTRO, the spectre, and also the title of a song by the Texan punk rock band Scratch Acid.

Each painting in the exhibition is a dense and ambiguous surface to look at, always concerned with the relationship between the human and the machine, and their reciprocal mimesis.

Exhibition runs through to November 23rd, 2014

Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris
France

www.maxhetzler.com

ANDREAS SCHULZE – TRAFFIC JAM

Posted on 2014-11-03

Andreas Schulze has turned his focus to a single modern design typology: the automobile. On each of the gallery’s three walls hangs a series of starkly colored, larger-than-life paintings of cars. Schulze, who is perhaps best known for immersive, spatially transformative installations, both acknowledges and destabilizes our existing pictorial understandings of quotidian objects.

In the way that a child’s drawing posits a car as the mere sum of its visible parts – a misshapen assemblage of windshields, wheels and windows – so do these works evince little concern for actual automotive design. The paintings’ essential wrongness, paired with their grandiose scale and impassive presentation, effects a Brechtian alienation. These are not depictions of automobiles; rather, they are pictures of pictures, explorations of the rough, indelible images that fundamentally inform our perception of these highly aestheticized machines.

The artist’s painterly act, like functional design, relies on cultural pre-conceptions and expectations. Imagination, invention and beauty occur within a semi-rigid template – a car painting must contain certain elements in order to be recognizable as such. Within this framework, these works accomplish the extraordinary: the self-imposed limitations serve not as a means to snide self-commentary, but as a gateway to an uncompromised artistic purity.

Exhibition runs from November 23rd to December 21st, 2014

Team (gallery, inc.)
47 Wooster Street
New York
NY 10013

www.teamgal.com

MARCUS JANSEN – WHISTLEBLOWER

Posted on 2014-10-27

Over the last decade Jansen’s subject matter continues to question a puzzling, fast moving world transformed through rich gestural paintings. The artist leads his audience on a journey across multiple views of abstract narrative scenes, combining action painting with objective subject matter while playing with space, light and perspective. The new series of complex constructions comment largely on socio-political issues of today, suggesting depth and movement within a flat plane using dramatic contrasts of colour, form, and texture.

Jansen belongs to a new generation of artists exploring urban influenced forms of expressionism, constructing landscapes with an embedded connection between street and contemporary art disciplines. Demonstrating a keen awareness of his surroundings the artist creates a surreal atmosphere filled with subconscious revelations that foretell of a future fraught with consequence.

Exhibition runs through to November 20th, 2014

Lazarides
11 Rathbone Place
London
W1T 1HR

www.lazinc.com

YAZID OULAB – SURVIVANCES

Posted on 2014-10-27

The works of Yazid Oulab are, for the most part, autobiographical and rich in a multiplicity of meanings: they bear witness to contemporary artistic practice and a spiritual path nourished by the heritage and symbolism of Sufi philosophy. However, Sufism is only one aspect of Oulab’s formal vocabulary. His work brings up the subtlety of paradox: born to a labourer father and an intellectual mother, Oulab defines himself as the result of them both, referencing and complementing manual labour and intellectual reflection while borrowing from religious imagery.

Clou and Alif represent the cornerstone of Yazid Oulab’s work. In 2006, he began developing the theme of the nail, which has many meanings, depending on the time and place of its use: it was once a form of currency, it is an important architectural tool, and it is also a reference to writing, since it was used in Mesopotamia for the cuneiform script. Far from being a spiritual equivalent of the stylite tower, this nail refers to building labours Maghreb immigrants undertook in France; something the artist has done himself when he arrived in Europe.

Exhibition runs through to December 6th, 2014

Caroline Pagès Gallery
Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão, 12 – 1° Dto.
1350-315 Lisbon
Portugal

www.carolinepages.com

DIANA RATTRAY – NEITHER HERE NOR NOW

Posted on 2014-10-27

Rattray’s style is quite her own, inspired by black-and-white photographs from English and German photo albums of the second half of the twentieth century. The artist’s own reading of this historical pictorial matrix is highly realistic and she interprets it in the same vein, albeit with the requisite pinch of irony, as when she lends the positivism of the 1950s a twist in the particular outcome that may be comic, awry or eccentric and quirky.

The types of figure that people the world of Diana Rattray’s pastel paintings will be familiar to everyone – folks at family celebrations, children in their Sunday best, families on day-trips – events recorded in order to have remembrance of this special day or that one moment on tap at any time. Some of the people seem to be adopting poses. They suspend what they are doing, face the viewer and lay on a smile in the knowledge that it will be recorded. The smile conditioned for the purpose is a preoccupation in this artist’s work. It is a smile that only takes place on the surface and reveals nothing about a person’s inner being.

At first glance it seems as if these paintings preserve a time in which everything was that little bit more ordered, a little simpler. But the viewer also becomes conscious of the choreographed nature of the scene. By heightening her colouring and amplifying a situation depicted, the artist points us toward a wider scope of meaning. The subtle elaboration of areas of shadow hints at the emotional world beyond the visible surface. A melancholy trait comes to the smiling lips, and something rigid to the faces; and, finding themselves face-to-face with the figures in the pictures, viewers are thrown back upon themselves. As a chronicler and at the same time an alert contemporary, Diana Rattray makes use of the distance in time and space to reconnect emotional memory. One’s own memory is triggered by the recognition of certain situations, and the figures in the pastel paintings become the projection surfaces for moments and feelingsout of personal experience. Simultaneously, the everyday nature of the situations Diana Rattray chooses for her paintings lends them a universality.

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2014

Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
Heinrich-Heine-Allee 19 & Neustrasse 12
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany

www.bugdahnundkaimer.com

PETER DE CUPER – THE DEFLOWERING

Posted on 2014-10-23

During one hour a statue made of frozen holy water melts. In the statue is a spot with real vaginal scent! When the madonna melts the vaginal scent start to mix with the holy water. In the room you start smelling the beauty of woman. When touching the melted liquid the original vaginal scent stays long on your finger.
The smell of pussy is real vaginal scent conserved as odorous substance and realized by a professional lab in Germany. The smell is produced by movement and sweating in the female intimate area. It took years to manage to capture the treasured organic vaginal scent. The scent is a mix of different women, of different origine and is a tribute to the freedom of being a free woman, exploring your sexual desires.
The work will be only on show during 2 hours, starting from the melting. After +/- 1 hour the vaginal scent will appear in the air. After melting visitors are allowed to touch the melted madonna and enjoy her scent of passion.

Exhibition runs September 23rd September, 11.30am – 1.30pm

MAD-faculty campus Hasselt
Elfde-Liniestraat 25
3500 Hasselt
Belgium