Soho Gallery roundup.
http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/visual-art/soho-galleries-from-josef-to-jason/826/
A sampling of galleries in Soho last weekend showed some very different trends and traditions, and some intriguing coincidences. At Peter Blum is Josef Albers’ Formulation : Articulation, 1972, a suite of 127 silkscreens paired off in folders. Essentially an overview of his body of work, it is displayed in vitrines that line the gallery’s walls. Most familiar are the three nesting squares in varying shades of one hue, alongside organic shapes emphasizing positive/negative, and his powerful interlocking grids of bars and squares.
Down Wooster Street is Premonitions, a show of Jules de Balincourt’s paintings at Deitch Projects. These colorful oils range from representational scenes that feel either post-apocalyptic or celebratory; to some more akin to symbolism or propaganda posters. A bunch of people on motorbikes exit a huge tunnel—escapees? participants in a race?; nearby are temporary tents like the kind set up for galas, and an out-of-place modern apartment house. In another, crowds of people line a beach. Are they recent evacuees? Clambake partygoers? The potential dual narratives are fascinating. (I don’t know when Deitch turned into a wannabe “Gossip Girl” location shoot, but one painting in particular, Power Flower, became the contemporary art equivalent of sticking your face in a cutout hole over Superman’s body, with a line of people waiting to have their picture taken at the painting’s exploding center. Vanity amid apocalypse, why not.)
Ronald Feldman’s first show of work by Jason Salavon, titled Old Codes, blends science and art in intriguing ways. A digital rendering of a mammal skull is actually a hypothetical blend of several species, listed by percentage; it evolves over the course of four hours, and is accompanied by some hyper-crisp stills of other species combos. He has taken the Ikea catalogue, purportedly more widely distributed than the Bible, and stripped it of content, leaving only structural blocks. A series of primarily abstract composites of portraits by four masters reduces the central subject to a flesh-toned visage floating amid the bronze chiaroscuro. In another series, he analyzed the color palettes from Baroque and Impressionist painting and created concentric squares representing each color value. The ghost of Albers was clearly in the gallery, perhaps wishing he’d had the technology available to Salavon.
Image: Jason Salavon, Baroque Painting, 2010. Archival ink on paper, 59″x59″, ed. of 7. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
A variant of a graph—the bands represent Rubens’ palette and the frequency with which he used each color.
A variant of a graph—the bands represent Rubens’ palette and the frequency with which he used each color.
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