Hellen Ascoli: Ya Te Vi
When Volcán de Fuego erupted in June last year, just outside Antigua, Guatemala, ash rained on nearby towns for days. It covered every surface, filling the fissures between the cobbled stones of Antigua’s narrow streets, and remaining there for months after the disaster. Artist Hellen Ascoli had moved from her home in Guatemala to Madison, Wisconsin the year before. From that distance, both conceptually and geographically, she received a letter from her friend and colleague Camila Fernández, describing the ash, everywhere.
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Gerardo Rosales: Looking for a Hero, or, Whips, Whims, and Wigs, and Gio Ponti is just an excuse
Orange and red tears fall from the eyes of the girl, their shapes morphing into inverted hearts, buttocks, amoeba. If we imagine them as metal (as the title would suggest), their hard surfaces are pocked with intricately circling indentations. Perhaps these tears are diseased, perhaps filled with seed. And yet, despite her steadily flowing tears, many larger than her head, our protagonist seems calm. She may be levitating, her short, pink legs ending in white lace socks and black shoes like those a child might wear to her first communion. Her white dress is frilled, scalloped, gathered, puffed. She might actually be a floating confection.
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Darren Waterston: Eventide
Channeling the specters and emotions that permeate landscape, Waterston’s new paintings create an unsteady and tenuous world. He paints dream-states and twilight, the moments at which daylight and darkness touch. “Eventide suggests the liminal in-between states both in dreams and twilight. Gossamer shapes and shadows emerge; playful chimera, phantoms and ghost-like forms occupy watery landscapes and celestial realms,” Waterston writes. “The paintings often juxtapose fastidiously painted representation up against loose, viscous gestures, stains, and abrasions.”
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Jamal Cyrus: BMW Art Journey
For the past two decades, Jamal Cyrus has consistently envisioned points of connection between the present and the past, between history, music, protest, and ritual. In his work, he excavates and juxtaposes cultural moments, using materials that are densely evocative. Cyrus's work is meditation and commemoration, a distillation of political and social struggles, and an exploration of how improvisation can offer potent re-imaginings of history. With the installation of these four works, Cyrus has constructed a kind of imaginary museum space in which functional objects—clothing, musical instruments, quilts—are made from the productive collision of cultural referents. These objects hold the evocative overlap of seemingly diverse, but connected, places.
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Brad Tucker: Temporary Relief
"Texts are a kind of abstraction," says Brad Tucker. Working from words he encounters in roadside signage and advertisements, Tucker makes paintings on shaped panel, with text extending from the painted surfaces, their wooden reliefs casting shadows over the composition. "Usually the reason I choose a text is because there is a word play there, or slippery grammar," he says. "Something should have an apostrophe or be capitalized, but it isn't... I think of them as authorless texts, meant to operate on you in a quick way. But I'm interested in how–aside from their function as advertising–how do these words or phrases bounce around inside your head?"
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Jim Richard: I Know a Place
In his deft mixing of 'high' and 'low' cultural imagery, Richard has always looked to invisible spaces, often playfully considering the role of art within such quotidian concerns. Since the early 1990s, when he shifted from painting in acrylic to oil paint, Richard's work has engaged the push-pull between Modernism and its environs. Now, working in the velvety matte surface of Flashé vinyl paints, Richard takes the conventions of paint-by-number to paint yards and gardens, each in a single color family: he paints Afternoon in rosy pinks and mauves, Cool Breeze in a range of green hues. As the Village Voice notes, Richard is adept at "channeling [a] sense of anxiety about what, exactly, constitutes art, once all the rules are in flux."
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Tommy Fitzpatrick: Factual Facts and Actual Facts
Containers or structures split apart and fracture, their walls resting on each other, mirroring themselves, and angling into the suggestion of other spaces in Tommy Fitzpatrick's newest paintings. At once citing architectural forms--the paintings are called Aedicule, Bascule, Monolith, Pavilion--and invoking the entrance of the figure, Fitzpatrick teases our sureness of where we are, what we know, and how we see. What happens if the walls our senses try to describe become transparent, reflective, or unstable? Looking to Josef Albers's lectures on color and perception, Fitzpatrick alludes to a contemporary moment in which even seemingly stable knowledge is called into question. "In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is," Albers writes in his 1963 experimental guide Interaction of Color, "In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”
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Paulo Whitaker: Losing It
Paulo insists on naming exhibitions rather than naming individual works, so together the fragments of thoughts lend themselves to a shared idea. And what are words, in the end, but abstractions strung together with an agreed upon connection to larger abstractions: to emotions, to experiences, to things that have happened, to histories. If we remove narrative, we describe impressions. The science behind emotions indicates that we perceive and pick up on the emotional states of others. That is, emotional fluctuations hang, quite literally, in the air. How do we talk about that intangible stuff, that stuff that permeates the air, that inexplicable sensation of dread or madness that creeps into our exchanges?
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Melanie Smith: Green is the Colour
“Green is green colonial,” Smith says. In her Fordlandia and Selva paintings, she uses the color green to find relationships between abstraction and reality, between urban and jungle entropy. Rather than looking backward with melancholy, she presents the location of colonization (in this case, the Amazon) as part of a broader implementation of modernization. There are not two modernities, she argues. There is not a successful Modernism in the West and a failed one outside the West. These places are, instead, part of the same project. Smith is naturally attracted to places where modernity gets messy: the town of Fordlandia is a perfect example.
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El Cuerpo Sutil // Miguel Ángel Rojas + John Sparagana
That involuntary apparition of long forgotten memories, triggered by the sensory experience of the tea and petites madeleines, illustrates the intangible, trickster nature of memory and the strength of an impression—visceral, sensory, overwhelming, and unexpected. Involuntary associations triggered by the cake surprise the narrator and then slip away. By the third bite, his thoughts are muddied and unclear. Based in feeling rather than cognition, such fleeting impressions spark deeper reflections. Do you know the feeling? That flash of an instinct that something is familiar, followed immediately by the realization that you have forgotten what was so familiar about it?
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Carmelo Arden Quin // Paintings, Collages, Mobiles, 1930s-1970s
When Carmelo Arden Quin (b. 1913, Uruguay) and artists Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss, and Tomás Maldonado produced the single-issue art and literary magazine Arturo in 1944, they articulated a desire shared by many young artists in Buenos Aires: to create a movement that would break free from the visual traditions of the past and move away from the “fictions” of representation. In manifestoes, poems, essays, and images, the magazine’s contributors described an abstract art for a new age. Arturo’s authors would go on to launch several abstract art movements in Argentina, including the Asociación de Arte Concreto-Invención and Perceptismo. And, shortly after Arturo appeared, Arden Quin co-founded the Madí group.
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