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Galeria Fortes Vila�a: Gerben Mulder - New Works Valeska Soares - Paragraphs - 1 Mar 2012 to 31 Mar 2012 Current Exhibition |
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Gerben Mulder, Untitled, 2012
Oil and charcoal on canvas 133 x 133 cm |
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Galeria Fortes Vilaça Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 Gerben Mulder New Works 01.03.2012 | 31.03.2012 Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present new paintings and drawings by Dutch artist Gerben Mulder. This is his third solo show at the gallery. This series takes a more lyrical path, exploring elements of abstraction. Even though these works have a figurative nature, they are far removed from realist representation. Throughout his career, Mulder has developed a body of work that establishes a dialogue with a tradition of European painting, which spans from Velázquez's children to the distorted figures of Edward Munch. With an iridescent palette, his portraits - and more recently his flowers vases and still-life - emphasize psychological aspects (melancholy and euphoria) and a subjective dimension of the images. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith situates this most recent production in the gap between Raoul Dufy and Jackson Pollock. That is, between an essentially figurative painting with traditional themes on the one hand, and abstract expressionism on the other. His new works radically emphasize the materiality of painting, being conceived in a physical way. The gesture is strikingly wide, quick, and omnipresent. The canvases are dominated by a reduced palette of colors in blue and gray tones, which create a more introspective atmosphere, as Heinrich Heine penned the words in "The Lorelei" or Goethe in "Nearness of the Beloved One", these paintings strike out in longing...yearning for something far away, but reaching through mark and stroke to bring that which is longed for near. The spiral brush strokes, graphic-like, retro modernist mark-making bring a contemporary edge to this genre. The vases of flowers, merely suggested in some canvases, are completely missing from others. In the drawings the emphasis also falls on gesture and quickness combined with strategies of subtle composition. Unlike what happens in the paintings, here there are no masses of color, but only the calligraphy that gives them movement. The intense and evident dialogue with abstract expressionism situates Mulder among contemporary painters who work with this legacy. - Galpão Fortes Vilaça Rua James Holland 71, Barra Funda Valeska Soares Paragraphs 03.03.12 | 14.04.12 We are pleased to present at Galpão Fortes Vilaça the exhibition Paragraphs, featuring new paintings by Valeska Soares. The Brazilian artist, who has been living for the last twenty years in New York, presents paintings with geometric compositions made with vintage dust jackets and hardcover books attached to unprimed Belgian linen. Parallel to these, a group of photographs is also shown. Literature is a recurrent theme in Soares's work. Texts by Calvino and Barthes have provided her with raw material for large installations and sculptures. More recently, the artist made a series of collages using the pages of book dedications, titles and chapters. These works deconstruct the physical and narrative structure of the novels, creating new texts of a nonlinear nature, closer to poetry. This strategy is enlarged in this new group of paintings, a series of works entitled Bindings. Although at first sight they look like formal and chromatic exercises, the used choice of texts and images on the covers and the links established among them make the works more familiar to the artist's conceptual practice and to her interest in narratives and fiction. Grouped by contrasting colors, they form large blocks on the surface of the canvas, like printed matter on a page. One perceives that the artist is not proposing a linear direction for the reading, but rather rotates the text in various directions, so our gaze runs along the covers in a labyrinthine way. An abstract mental image is gradually formed that blends recollections of known stories with the musicality that arises in the juxtaposition of the titles. In the other body of work, Edits, Soares digitally manipulates pages of the book A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes, masking large portions of the text with black volumes, in geometric compositions that recall the paintings, but using a strategy which in a certain way runs counter to them. The digital prints wind up forming a new text that includes textual highlighting and folded pages that activate questions related to memory. |
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