OMAR CHACON – BACANALES TROPICALES

Posted on 2012-09-17

Chacon’s signature droplets of color-saturated paint return smaller, more concentrated, and brimming with energy and color. At the start of each painting, thousands of acrylic ovals are prepared, then peeled and collaged onto canvas. Taking advantage of the synthetic qualities of acrylic – its bright, slick sheen, and pliability, Chacon’s surfaces glisten with exuberant color, projecting a spirit of optimism with a nod to discovery, both in everyday life and in the surprising details of each painting.

Although his paintings are visually abstract, Chacon personifies each oval in the process of creating the individual elements of his compositions. Forming a synergy through color and commonalities between ovals as he composes his surfaces, Chacon’s paintings are a metaphor for a social gathering where individuals amass, swelling into an energetic conglomerate, enlightened by a diverse cultural mix. Bacanales, observed in the exhibition title and in the titles of his paintings, refer to the wild and festive spirit of the Greco-Roman god Bacchus as well as Colombian street vernacular for something that is optimal.

Opposite – Bacanal Guacari, 2012

Exhibition runs through to October 20th, 2012

Margaret Thatcher Projects
539 West 23rd Street
Ground Floor
New York
NY
10011

www.thatcherprojects.com

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ANGELA DUFRESNE – PARLORS AND PASTORALS

Posted on 2012-09-10

In most instances, the paintings have been executed alla prima. Through these single, sustained sessions, Dufresne animates familiar subjects in unexpected ways, generating “cover” versions of her own as well as a sense of emotional urgency.

What begins as a riff expands, through layered association, to a dense, lushly symphonic scale. In Lady David-Rosemary Angeles in a Golden Swamp, the artist inverts the gender of Bernini’s biblical David, combining portraits of her mother and herself, and isolates the torquing figure against a backdrop inspired by an Albert Bierstadt landscape as well as trees from the Hudson Valley. An exploration of Tiépolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra turns into Banquette Concerto with Head; the balustrade in the background of the original Baroque painting becomes a rope bridge, the table centerpiece a severed head, an exploratory mark Condoleezza Rice.

Dufresne’s investigations emerge not from fandom or homage but the impulse to inhabit known material and discover unexpected points of connection. In merging contradictory or improbable elements – Buster Keaton at a film screening of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark, for instance, Dufresne erases the lines between pop vernacular and fine art, spectator and performer, memory and imagination.

Opposite – Shopswine with Hairstyles and Art Storage, 2011

Exhibition runs through to October 6th, 2012

CRG Gallery
548 West 22nd Street
New York
NY
10011

crggallery.com

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DANIELE BUETTI – GARCON, L’ADDITION!

Posted on 2012-09-10

Like in his earlier works, everything starts with photographic images. However, in this case Buetti reuses images, which do not derive from fashion magazines but from documentary photography. They tell from terror, war and seemingly insoluble conflicts. Their cruelty and suffer cause dismay. Mostly, these images reach us only via private snapshots along intricate paths. The artist converts these pictures towards abstraction and thereby extinguishes large parts of their information. Through the form of their new presentation and its underlying character, they nearly become icons. As before, Buetti irritates us with a sense for aesthetic arrangements and a
pretended enticing beauty.

The artist transforms the original motives in many production steps on the computer in such a way that their original content seems to disappear behind the aesthetic surface. Parts of the pictures are extracted and substituted with coloured pieces in different sizes. Merely the outlines of the central figures and structures remain rudimentarily recognizable, although they are also segregated into little colour-segments. However, the intervention goes further. The outlines are cut out with a laser contour cut, so that a mosaic-like surface emerges.

In most works, several figures are to be recognised. Without knowledge of the original image, the scenes are not discernible. Only indications remain. In the work „oh boy oh boy_V“, an image of a prisoner tortured by American soldiers from Abu Ghraib in Bagdad remains unambiguously recognizable. As a result, incertitude arises in terms of what we see in all other works of the series. The title of the series pushes this ambivalence even further. As an exclamation of surprise the German correspondence of the series title „oh boy oh boy! “ leaves open whether it is a remark of joy or, nevertheless, desperation.

Opposite – Oh boy oh boy XVIII_A, 2011

Exhibition runs through to October 20th, 2012

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art GmbH
Niddastrasse 84, 1st Floor
60329
Frankfurt
Germany

www.bernhardknaus-art.de

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CHEON PYO LEE – MEDIUM IS THE SAME

Posted on 2012-09-10

Lee persistently examines questions of medium and genre through a sensitive and personalized body of work. Medium is the Same employs Lee’s personal economy to create a narrative atmosphere, a space full of lingering tones, endless chatters and moody humor. As an expedition into the complexities of association and narrative, the exhibition comprises two floors with a series of surprises and inversions.

Taking on the dual character of both engine and vehicle, the exhibition allows one to move in and outside the workings of travel and trade. Each individual work espouses a particular approach to fabrication. Chinese Waterfall, Broom, and the altered clapping monkeys within Felicity, investigate the myriad forms of kinetic sculpture, through components such as; custom built gears, bill counters, conveyer belts, and appropriated figurines.

Comparatively, in the basement project space, Lee has created an installation focusing on the journey of a container ship as it dumps toxic waste across the oceans, without a destination or an owner. Within Felicity and Wave Patterns, Lee’s palette acquires a crisp plasticity, mimicking graphic and industrial prototyping. The stylistic differences between the two floors are dismantled in the fragmented debris spotting the wall pieces that double the exhibition’s title, Medium is the Same.

Exhibition runs through to October 14th, 2012

Interstate Projects
66 Knickerbocker Ave
Brooklyn (Bushwick)
New York
NY
11237

www.interstateprojects.com

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ROMAN LISKA – NU BALANCE

Posted on 2012-09-03

Roman Liška’s most recent body of work incorporates excerpts from the Financial Times Weekend Magazine’s “Life & Arts” section, from which it draws headlines including “Wealth Creations”, “Chalet Girls” and “Risqué Business”, as well as passages from “How To Spend It” (HTSI), the publication’s insert that promotes luxury products aimed at the super affluent. In Liška’s practice, advertisements for auctions of blue chip post-war art and the latest fashions from the world́s runways conjoin under semi-translucent, perforated mesh, are treated with spray paint rendered in a tie-dye aesthetic, and gain punctuation through eyelets that unmask layers of black cling film and newsprint bearing traces of the FT’s distinctive rosé hue.The formal determinations of these interventions extend the artist’s investigations into the language of painting – problematising dominant models of the practice’s limits while iterating shape, texture, and haptic engagement as contributors to painting’s ongoing redefinition.

The ephemera of wealth creation, such as the FT and its sub-publication, act as barometers of the obscene logic of late-capitalist models of consumption in which seduction is a principle currency owing to its trade in the unceasing renewal of synthetic desires. It is in this arena that Liška’s work activates an irresoluble tension: existing as an object whose aesthetic qualities contribute to its legibility as a commodity that operates dually in signaling the spirit of the contemporary while elaborating an implied critique of the very systems that sustain its production and distribution.

Exhibition runs from September 13th to October 20th, 2012

Rod Barton Gallery
One Paget Street
London
EC1V 7PA

www.rodbarton.com

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SUSUMU SHINGU – BEYOND TIME

Posted on 2012-09-03

The japanese artist returns with an exhibition of eight new mobile sculptures specifically created for the interior, together with a series of watercolours on paper.

A sculptor and researcher, Susumu Shingu creates sculptures that are often monumental, with movements generated by the forces and flows of nature – wind, water, sunlight and gravity. He also works regularly in other artistic disciplines with well-known architects such as Renzo Piano or Tadao Ando, as well as designers like Issey Miyake and choreographer like Jiri Kylian.

Starting out from scientific research on movement, based on observation of the nature of the human body and of nature, Susumu Shingu has created and installed several hundred wind and water sculptures around the world, all of them mobile, dancing, polyphonic and playful.

Exhibition runs from September 15th to December 1st, 2012

Galerie Jaeger Bucher
5 & 7 rue de Saintonge
75003Paris
France

www.galeriejaegerbucher.com

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