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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
The gigantic murals of the Peruvian painter El Decertor run along sidewalks in Lima, on apartment buildings in Baltimore, and on streets and buildings in Venezuela, Morocco, and Mexico, just to name a few. Across each city, the work features consistent motifs of complex, colorful backgrounds made from fractured polygon patterns, with a prominent figure at the mural’s focus. These figures are mostly mystical — they are clearly human, painted with an empathetic realism, but posed with some symbolic gesture or object: metaphors for immigration, agriculture, housing, meditation, colonialism. Occasionally the murals drift into the surrealistic, framing an alternate reality for passersby throughout the city to gaze into, and perhaps recognize some of their own inside.
There seems to be a history running through Carmel Seymour’s water colors, but it’s hard to pin down. Somewhere in the hazy but sublime gap between art and illustration, the paintings suspend an alternate reality in the canvas’ mid-air, depicting some hyperreal folklore in a wash of negative space. Seymour’s conceit seems simple enough: she places contemporary figures, such as girls in jeans and sneakers, in some private oasis, perhaps the figures’ dream landscape or perhaps some alien planet. But the landscapes where her figures exist are not so much 'scapes as objects; entities without a before or after. Her water colors are deployed in highly restrained and linear strokes to focus on details, and then exploded to disrupt the hyperrealism and maximize the medium’s atmospheric emphasis. The paintings have no clear beginning or end, but beg the question: what’s the story here?
Despite the meticulous control and calculated perspectives, Canadian artist Adam Lupton’s oil paintings are constantly fidgeting. They mostly feature youth in various incarnations in a blur of motion represented as simultaneous frames, or with different layers of paint exposed. This jitteriness is revealed both through substance, by showing the layers of material creation, or through time, as the viewer pans multiple freeze-frames overlaid on top of each other. What stands still throughout all his work is an obsession with time and chaos, and the individual’s navigation of the two in the constant present.
Swiss painter Barbara Tosatto’s work takes cues from the storied and symbolic. Most of her pieces focus on a solitary figure, transplanted in some vacant background, isolated from indicators of time or setting. These figures are human, but disrupted — bound in sheets and gauzy veils, or weighed down with ropes or chains. With titles like “The Tyranny of Doubt” or “The Truce” it’s hard not to see the pieces as portraits of mythological characters, embodying some archetypal human ability or curse. Mostly depicted with their faces obscured, or contorted from some type of bondage, the figures’ entrapment seems more tragic in their desolate surroundings, offering no alternative to the struggle. But their situation is still somehow noble, if seen as shouldering the weight of humanity’s conditions.
South African designer Justin Plunkett’s “Con/struct” series has more in common with the digitally-fabricated renderings of speculative architecture than documentary photography, but it illustrates an eerie collision of both formats. The images are built from a combination of photography, 3D modeling and substantial post-production editing, to form street-level perspectives of futuristic urban fantasies.
There’s a problematic aspect to Hiromi Tango’s sculptures that invites the viewer's intervention, simply because they are a complete mess. Tangled bits of string, plush and rigid baubles are knotted together into a bulbous hodgepodge around a core of light, sometimes with a single word sculpted in neon at the center. Strands of fabric and material reach out like dendrites on a neuron, feeling for a connection but isolated from everything on a blank white gallery wall, asking the viewer to sit a while and try to untangle it.
Courtney Mattison’s ceramics are clearly inspired and motivated by the ocean — that immense, powerful and precious resource whose details are still largely hidden from us. Self-identifying as both an artist and “ocean advocate," Mattison has created massive installations, “Our Changing Seas, I-III,” that cover a bio-diverse selection of coral reef forms. Displayed in a gallery, the pieces appear to grow out of the wall, as if miraculously alive in the dry, alien atmosphere. The ceramic medium allows for remarkable ranges in color, spanning the spectrum of actual living coral to the bone-dry, matte whiteness of its dead state. Both versions are present in Mattison’s pieces, reminding us that these entities are desperately in need of preservation. "Our Changing Seas III" is currently on view at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Miguel Chevalier’s projection-based “virtual art” has a knack for constructive anachronisms. Hinting at the no-holds-barred collage-fest of Internet art, which samples from the entire history of visual media, Chevalier’s light projections put digital imagery onto the current built environment, making it immediately accessible and interactive. His “Magic Carpets” (2014) projection glazes the floor of Casablanca Cathedral in Morocco, a former Roman Catholic church turned cultural center, with colorful patterns, flitting between psychedelic paisley and abstract pixelated geometries. The patterns are reactive to the movements of walkers through the church’s nave, constantly shifting and morphing.
There is a wrinkle in Joana Vasconcelos’s space-time. Her colorful and audacious sculptural work is composed mostly of recognizable objects, transformed by a costume of a wolf or sheep’s clothing (depending on your angle, really) to resemble artifacts from a past or future time, or perhaps another universe altogether. Materialistically, the gaze lingers on tactility — many of her pieces include fabrics and textiles in booming colors, delicately wrapping a nude statue or bursting in succulent stuffings.
Beccy Ridsdel’s “surgically-altered” sculptures investigate craft in reverse. Everyday flatware is put under the knife, its outer layer peeled back to expose the innards: delicately patterned florals. The materiality of the dishes transforms from a rigid, fragile china to the supple, elastic skin of a surgeon’s patient, peeled back on the operating table. Treating the flatware as a cadaver study, Ridsdel is trying to understand the elemental structure of her craft, exposing her audience to the design and care inside a seemingly mundane ceramic object. The normal object becomes special; a specimen to study and understand.
Equally at home on the street and on the gallery wall, Hong Kong-based artist collective Parent’s Parents produce tight graphical work mixing graffiti art and comic characters. The group of young Chinese artists/designers met while still in school, and produce drawings, (spray-) paintings, illustrations and leather crafts that feature anthropomorphic characters with a wonderfully-demented vibe. Much of their large-scale mural works in galleries feature English text, placing typographic design alongside collage-work and fantastical, chaotic characters. From their own mouths, this collective of millennial artists see their whimsical and urban-minded work as a way for them to “explore the limitless of chaos, exceptional beauty and modernness.”
The stretching, effusively colorful installations of Lisa Hoke are at the same time a landscape and a living thing. Sometimes made from cardboard packing materials, or the reeling repetition of a recognizable label, or simply painted cups, her installations span huge walls, creating an arching spectrum of textured color. At a distance, it’s an alien topography, looking like a chunky rainbow sprawl, but closer up, the materials show themselves, and their intricately patterned organization appears engineered by the hive-mind of an obsessive insect colony. Once the individual parts become recognizable, especially as advertisements, the installations click as an interpretation of the politics of reuse, and the willful accumulation of excess garbage in the name of artistic expression.
The ladies exposing themselves in Lilli Hill’s paintings are mostly big and almost always brash, posing nude in the evacuated context of a formal portrait. Hill paints the great, creamy rolls of her fleshy women with impressive detail, and the expressions and postures are poised to convey a hearty defiance and flirtatiousness — whether embracing a minotaur, decapitating roosters, or channeling Rubens. That defiant gaze makes the ladies’ portraits both difficult to look away from and a lighthearted study of disgust and curiosity. Some of the later portraits follow a more surreal tone, incorporating illusions and costume, but the playfulness (and the fleshiness) remains. Hill’s paintings will be on display March 13-16 at KK Galerie's booth for the art fair Karlsruhe 2014 in Rheinstetten, Germany.
PRISMA Collective celebrated the opening for its second exhibition at WWA Gallery this past Saturday in Culver City. Founded in 2011 by painter and curator Kaspian Shore, the international collective of thirty artists works mostly in the domain of painting, digital art, drawing, illustration and sculpture. Their work on display at WWA Gallery is bound together not by a singular style, but by a kindred fascination with the natural and animal world. Many of the pieces, a smattering of focused portraits approaching the illustrated reality of Grimm’s fairy tales, convey the whimsicality of a complete child’s storybook. The single image or sculpture becomes a stand-in for an entire narrative arc.
The “Hair Pieces” photography series by Rebecca Drolen is a study of the objectification of a person's body — in this case, the artist's own. Drolen poses for a series of self-portraits, calmly composed in black and white, accessorized with hair in natural and unnatural places. In somewhat grotesque suggestions of vanity’s affectations, a woman (Drolen) curls eyelashes as long as her forearm, wears broom-like blond earrings or affixes a braid of freshly-cut hair to her collar. Many of the photos feature only part of the artist — the hair a stand-in for both the presence and absence of a person. The poses reference classic conflicts of body politics, playing with issues of femininity and sexuality, and the collection as a whole questions the nature of personhood: how we manage and relate to the detached parts of ourselves.
Thomas Woodruff’s paintings do not shy from ornamentation. They are insistently lush, not only through the simple visual stimulation of varied colors or precise detail, but in their presumed backstories. You could say that Woodruff has an allegorical style — the scenes depicted (whether of vengeful jungle animals, underwater interspecies marriages, or illusionary clowns) are so magically complete in their strange stagings that they must be a rigorously blocked scene from an ongoing play in his head. Everything seems rife with significance, either as symbol or reference, triggering the viewer to make up her or his own entire (albeit fantastical) histories around a single image. Read more after the jump.
Patrick Gonzales’s work blends both time and materials — they could easily be cousins to René Magritte’s surrealist paintings if not for their contemporary subjects, and while ultimately paintings, their texture is built on digital rendering techniques. The scenes depicted are mysterious and, while not dramatic outright, fraught with emotion, blending dreamy landscapes with a childish (but not juvenile) sense of fantasy. Based in Dijon, France, Gonzales’s most recent pieces are modifications of portraits, digitally-turned into monochromatic scenes with subtle flecks of surrealism. Visions of placid females and leafy landscapes are recurring but not repetitive, posing the question — is this what Gonzales dreams of?
Annemarie Busschers makes landscapes out of faces. The massive, closely-framed portraits are painted with rich detail, creating a nearly-overwhelming presence. While her subjects have shifted from the likes of children with chicken pox and old men more towards herself in more recent work, the attention to texture and layers within the face is never compromised, treated ominously in monochromatic tones that often have the subject fading or dripping away from the present-painting entirely. Busschers was born in ‘S-Hertogenbosch, the same town in the southern Netherlands that was home to Hieronymus Bosch, and it showed early in her career — her pencil drawings are extremely precise and fantastically complex, while grappling with religious themes. But in her current state, the focus is always on an individual, often caught in a moment of tension, the incredible surplus of visual details both demonstrative and expressive.
The massive works by Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, are meant for the city. Known for his portraits chiseled directly onto the walls of buildings throughout the world, Portuguese artist Vhils recently experimented with the medium of cork, creating a gigantic, almost frieze-like scene of faces, words and patterns, entitled Contraste. Elements of the piece vary in depth, making it undulate as the gaze moves across, like parts of it are reaching out to the viewer. Faces are rendered in splotchy, almost pixelated densities, appearing clearly at some angles and completely disappearing in others. Contraste is big, complex, noisy and varies whichever way you look at it — true to Vhils' forum of the city. The piece is currently on view in Covilhã, Portugal, at Portugal Telecom's data center.
Something about Ryan and Trevor Oakes’s matchstick sculptures is very, very nerve-wracking. Hundreds of matchsticks, the classic, strike-anywhere, red-topped, wooden sticks, come together as gracefully twisting shapes, some geometric, some almost geological. The multiple textures of the rough wooden wand, clay-like red head and dusty, white tip transform when seen en masse, into a subtle color gradient that gives the sculptures an elusive meta-texture when seen from afar. Each matchstick is a small piece of anxiety, waiting to be lit, but collectively, the sculptures are slumbering monsters, neat and tidy for now.
Mostly recognized for his kinetic oil-on-canvas pieces, Simon Birch’s vastly multi-mediated art tends towards the fantastical, constantly referencing the alternate realms of the digital, ephemeral, or just plain virtual. Painting, installation, sculpture, circus, photography, live tigers, film — all have come together in massive shows that accurately represent the near-manic vim and vigor in Birch’s practice. Read more after the jump.