Jill Smith

Spanish painter, Carlos Aquilino, works in a variety of styles to explore themes as wide-ranging as the role of the individual in society to the rhythms and logic of chaos.  His background and approach to art marking are distinctive and compelling. He started his career with his first exhibition in 1975 in Las Palmas (Spain), at which time he also participated in several national painting competitions and group exhibitions. In the same year, he illustrated the book of poems, Máscaras. In 1977, he won the Painting Prize of the City of Madrid (Spain) followed by the Grand Medal of Sculpture at the Anzio International Art Competition in Rome (Italy). In the years and decades following this auspicious start of his career, he continued to travel and hone his artistic craft in locations all over the world, including: Vienna, Austria (1979); Virginia, Unites States (1983); New Mexico, Unites States (1983); Romania (1995); and Paris, France (2000). Today he lives and works in Madrid, the city of his birth.

His paintings of the 1990s and 2000s are reminiscent of the Metaphysical Painting School of the teens and 20s, in his exploration of the unconscious through dreamscapes, surreal vistas, and the arrangement of seemingly unrelated objects. Sculptural forms are rendered naturalistically, yet located in strange locales. Employing his keen and compulsive observation of the world around him, he finds inspiration in every aspect of his daily life.  Through his unflinching gaze, he captures life’s deeper truths, gleaned through a lifetime of experience and travel. “I paint, make drawings and sculptures using any and all materials I find around myself,” he explains. “I use them as classically as possible…meaning…if I want to paint, I paint over what is possible and where it is possible, whether this is on the floor, on a table, in a cafe or wherever I go.” Using classical techniques, he renders his depictions life-like through his adept approach to the materiality of his paint, as well as his subtle and tenuous line and brushwork. Through his total control of medium (generally oils) and composition, and his expressive surfaces, he pours his own imaginative creativity into each painting. In palettes that range from ominous cool hues to smoldering warm ones, these images are portentous and muted expressions of Aquilino’s strange and marvelous fantasies.

His current body of work is more whimsical in concept and execution. They consist of all-over compositions that depict patterns, which from afar appear abstract. However, upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be detailed and carefully rendered line drawings of recognizable imagery: city buildings, cars, mask-like faces, and words. They evoke the chaos of the city; its speed, crowding, and excitement emanates from theses canvases, literally dropping the viewer into the middle of the chaotic hubbub of the metropolis. There is a folkloric quality to these emblematic images as well in their simple graphic styles, which consist of black line work on white grounds, and are usually filled in with shockingly bright hues: yellows, oranges, violets, hot pinks, cerulean blues, lime greens. Words in Spanish and English are embedded into the patterning, like secret messages that need to be decoded: “Paz,” “Aqui,” “Amor,” “Voy,” “Madrid,”  “Where is it,” “Free,” “Please,” “I Love,” “Open,” “Gallery,” “New York.” Other freestanding letters float like graphic elements devoid of lexical signification. Like Picasso’s early cubist collages, these letters and words function as loose referents to the city, yet maintain a simultaneous sense of ambiguity: Are they from store signs? From conversations? From advertisements? Language permeates city life; we are constantly inundated with visual and aural words, a quotidian experience that Aquilino so aptly captures through these images.

Drawing to mind the dynamic patterning and coloring of traditional Mexican art, the influence of his time spent in that country is also evident. These images also evoke the all-over patterning of Pop artist, Keith Haring, who like Aquilino, employed bold graphics and representations of crowded people and city scenes to evoke the buzzing, swirling, rhythmic beats of city life. Drawing on the best of Pop traditions, graphic art, Surrealism, and traditional Latin American styles, Aquilino creates stunning and gripping images that pull the viewer in and don’t let go, resulting in a visual experience that is akin to a reckless taxi ride through New York’s Time Square: the glaring lights, jolting smells, and clamorous noise of the city streets are literally felt as one gets lost in these forceful and gripping images.

Instinctive and intuitive, Aquilino is fanatical about his art, working constantly. Always marching to the beat of his own drum, he is not concerned by the ebbs and flows of trends and fashions; rather, he is perpetually true to his own spirit. There is a structure and logic to these images of chaos, a grace and elegance that emerges from their churning patterns. And this is Aquilino’s ultimate message: his fascination with the city stems from its enduring and ceaseless energy and vigor, qualities that he finds beautiful, an insight that he deftly shares with his audience.

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Astuni Public Studio

In tempo di crisi le gallerie più intraprendenti si impegnano nella ricerca. È così che nasce Astuni Public Studio, un progetto col quale la Galleria Enrico Astuni a partire da ottobre 2009, nel suo nuovo spazio inaugurato lo scorso gennaio a Bologna, presenta una serie di iniziative nell’ambito dell’arte contemporanea curate da alcuni dei migliori critici italiani e stranieri: una proposta che non ha fini diretti di mercato, ma punta ad indagare nuove modalità espositive e di comunicazione dell’arte.

Viva l’Italia è il titolo della prima mostra del ciclo curata da Fabio Cavallucci, che si inaugura il 2 ottobre 2009 alle ore 18, con opere provenienti da collezioni private e importanti gallerie, o in alcuni casi prodotte specificamente per l’occasione. Viva l’Italia non è propriamente una mostra di carattere critico, tesa ad indagare una logica di sviluppo storico-artistico, ma attraverso l’accostamento di opere di artisti di diversa provenienza culturale e stilistica intende rappresentare un’atmosfera. In un display che coinvolge anche il tempo, oltre che lo spazio, con una successione di immagini e suoni, l’Italia viene evocata attraverso le sue simbologie, i suoi miti, le sue paure, tra segni di decadenza, sentimenti di nostalgia, precari elementi di novità. Prende vita un caleidoscopio di emozioni da cui emerge l’immagine di una nazione spezzata, incerta, di cui restano solo brandelli, anche della sua stessa storia. Tutto è pervaso da un’atmosfera malinconica, talvolta cinica, propria di un paese che sembra non avere più carattere e finalità. Viva l’Italia è una mostra struggente, che vuol fare meditare e discutere, più che offrire un punto di vista univoco.

La mostra include opere di: Rossella Biscotti, Maurizio Cattelan, Nemanja Cvijanovic, Luciano Fabro, Daniel Knorr, L’Epimeteide, Marcello Maloberti, Gian Marco Montesano, Gianni Motti, Cesare Pietroiusti, Leonardo Pivi, Costa Vece, Sislej Xhafa. Completa l’esposizione Viva l’Italia una pubblicazione in formato giornale, in cui voci di filosofi, politici, sociologi, artisti e scrittori si confrontano col tema dell’Italia, della sua storia e del suo futuro.

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Ryan Gander

There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes me up, and puts me in a position where I have to start thinking from zero again.

The jump from, say, being a tailor to making a fictional feature film to architecturally designing an art school based on Bentham’s Panoptican, is massive but means that I find myself in a place that is so unfamiliar that I push myself to reassess everything. As painters may use color, I use “stuff.” This can be anything and end up anywhere… a conversation, a big Mac wrapper, a car, martial arts, a handshake, hotel management, ear piercing, a dance, a typeface, fog…

There’s something really nice about being light on your feet, and I enjoy seeing it in other artists’ work. It is similar to moon walking; you spend more time in the assent and dissent between steps or projects than you do actually with them. That gives you a really good position from which to look at the constantly changing position, and this perspective gives you a privilege of hindsight, as if you were a spectator yourself, musing over a work for the very first time.

I think being an artist is a really good job to have.

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Claire Feely

Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing the viewer with the sense of a floating and wavering delicacy. Perhaps mimicking the movement and feeling of the surrounding plant life, the nude that takes center stage amongst them translates some of the same notions. Lying, ever so elegantly and modestly over herself, with the same grace of a Renaissance nude, her form sings the similarly smooth melody into the photo’s composition. She shies away from the viewer’s gaze, looking in toward herself, preserving her anonymity. There is a sort of conceptualized female elegance that ties into and seems to accentuate the visual beauty and harmony that can be found in this photo’s smooth textures, brilliant colors, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, and harmonious composition.

Diverging slightly from the mood found in Shaw’s Red Flower Girl, Black Forest renders a different perception. Sitting atop a more prominently stark black background are two rows of red birds of paradise, most of which have not opened or bloomed, they stand pointing straight up with their appendages of leaves straying not far, at a close angle. The two lines of flowers are separated by a female nude bridged in between, belly up. Her hips and upper thighs receive the most light while the rest of her fades into the background, though just enough light is spared to make the figure’s nipple visible, just barely peeking around the edge of a leaf; its presence is subtly made known. Still it does not nearly serve as provoking as the larger and more highlighted display of the figure’s genitalia. Standing with the same sharp, erected presence as the birds of paradise, the figure’s pubic hair points out straight to form a fan of hair. There is a sharpness pronounced in this piece, a tone of confrontation, of tantalizing threat. The flowers’ piercing presence along with the provocative pose of the female nude make for a depiction many would consider “naked” in comparison to the classic “nude.” Shaw’s photographs depict the dichotomy of the female nude in art. Blushing, tender, graceful is a traditional, modest nude against a sprawled, spread, open and unabashed naked woman of what we’ve come to associate contemporary portraits with. The result of the juxtaposition of the two seems to create a stressed, disquieting transition from one to the other, playing with the audience’s personal regards of femininity.

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Edward Rubin

Filling Chace Center to the brim, the largest gallery at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum of Art in the City of Providence, Inner City comprised an astonishing array of architectural-scale models and tiny figurines fashioned entirely out of clay. All the little male people—the sculptor’s version of Everyman—strikingly similar in their facial and bodily characteristics, bring to mind countless crowd scenes found in old Depression-ear Hollywood movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man. Think Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or the densely populated panels of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: here mankind is seen variously at work, daydreaming, carousing, or marching off to war—in short, going through the daily grind of industry.

Before turning to figure modeling, Zimmerman, a mid-career artist, with a master’s degree from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, was drawn to large ceramic pots and container forms. During his early college years he spent his summers carving monumental blocks of limestone in the south of France. In grad school he began to build large, thick-walled hollow pottery forms. When the clay became leather-hard, he carved the surface, giving it the appearance of worked stone. In 1996, putting on the back burner his large totemic vessels, which first brought him to public awareness, Zimmerman, whose studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn boasts it own kiln, switched his attention to modeling the human figure.

The RISD installment, its third and most comprehensive to date, was first exhibited at the Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon in 2007. On that occasion, Montepegado and Zimmerman, whose partnership began with a figure-only exhibit in 2005, decided to employ industrial archetypes to add narrative weight to the overall montage. Using cement blocks of varying heights and dimensions as their foundation, they started constructing a complete miniature city whose dramatically lit towers and other buildings serve as backdrop to the activities of its Lilliputian inhabitants. At Leeuwarden’s Princessehof Museum the following year, again playing as city planners, they added scaffolding, walkways, and a street-like grid, conjuring a vibrant city surging uncontrollably ahead.

Cobbled together from hundreds of handcrafted figurative and architectural elements, all situated on or astride the white pedestals and walls, the installation teemed with an army of buildings, chimneys, industrial pipes, I-beams, stairs, a giant ladder, and assorted downtrodden masses, either alone or in groups. Everywhere Zimmerman’s colorfully glazed men, when not involved in real work, can be seen arguing or fighting amongst themselves. Most are carting heavy loads, carrying industrial tools, and in some cases weapons of war. A number meld into the very loads they’re hauling, while others have jugs or tubes for heads. Crowning the lot is a large ominous black bridge and an elevated viewing platform, an arresting coda to this exercise in clay nation. Taken as a whole, Inner City is a window on the human condition, engendering a hypnotic, if crushing experience. Think of the urban dystopia of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. No wonder the viewer is left contemplating the fate of humanity.

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Art should be in the streets surprising people, not necessarily in galleries or museums.
Art should be part of everyone’s daily journey into work.
Art should make us laugh and catch people unaware.
Art should show us something that we can all understand.
Art should make us think effortlessly.
Art should question its own what-ness.

Patricio Forrester

Art should be in the streets surprising people, not necessarily in galleries or museums.

Art should be part of everyone’s daily journey into work.

Art should make us laugh and catch people unaware.

Art should show us something that we can all understand.

Art should make us think effortlessly.

Art should question its own what-ness.

Art shouldn’t be instantly recognizable as art.

Art should make us forget what we want and make us wonder.

Art should never be boring or obscure.

Art should not make people feel they ought to know anything they don’t already know.

Art should provide new connections, routes, and trains of thought.

Art should not be patronizing.

Art shouldn’t really be anyone’s vanity. 

Art should be out there, showing how life is extremely interesting.

Art should be ideologically, politically and socially committed.

Art should be involved in worthy causes and be an agent of change.

Art should be brave and occasionally subtle.

Art should be better than the artist that did it.

Art should always be better than the artist’s statement.

The post Man If Est O appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Cristina Lucas

My work is about how artificially identities are constructed, and how it is possible to undermine the myths of social conventions such as the political borders, languages, religions, and last but not least, art. The tool used is just to take to the extreme the logic contained on them.

I put into dialogue drawings, photographs, videos, and installations where myself, other people, or even live animals orchestrate performative acts that confront the symbols, myths, and metaphors of the foundations of Western patriarchal dominance. The use of satire within my practice produces a moral ambivalence, which unsettles any fixation on a historical victimization of women, concerning their social visibility and mobility in the public sphere. Nonetheless, the criticality in my work can be found precisely in the stereotypical, literal representation and overexposure of the significance of signs in both misogynist traditions and feminism’s own agendas and contested genealogy.

The experience of the language is a fundamental part of the experience of knowledge. Curiously religion and art are founded on the impossibility of talking about the truth by common words.

In the video Talk (2008) I recreate the violent act of Michelangelo giving birth by kicking the knee of the sculpture, and demanding the statue to talk. This time is a woman who is asking in a beautifully brutal way to know the secrets only revealed to the men and by the men. First God spoke to Moses and later on gave Michelangelo almost the secrets of life or at least immortality, curiously by art. Very recent work as La Liberté Raisonné (2009), is a video that comments on the inherent contradiction that can be found in Delacroix’s 1830 painting La Liberté guidant le people, in which one finds the petrification of a woman as a female allegory that represents liberty. But I am as well very interested in cartography as the way of understanding concepts as national identities, citizenships, or sexuality.

In Pantone (2007), a 2D animation of 41 minutes, I show abstract colors that second by second are changing, and finally creating our actual political world. There is no name on those colored tasks, but the perception of too many cultures appearing and disappearing in silence creates state identities. It was present at the Istanbul Biennale, the noisy version of seven historians explaining a particular area of the map in which they were experts but all of them talking at the same time. The sound was cacophonic.

Light Years (2009), a luminous cartographic installation that gave the name to my last solo exhibition at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, chronologically visualizes a sort of pandemic of democracy in a global adoption of universal suffrage and its various forms of geopolitical appropriation.

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Zhou Bin

To me, performance art is not only a medium or material to create with, but also a reflection of an artist who keeps his independent spirit and creativity. In 2001, China’s Department of Culture Supervision released an article that states, “Violent or pornographic performance art is prohibited in public.” However, what is pornographic or violent is vague and hard to define. The majority of performance art stems from the human body. At the same time, poignant sarcasm is what characterizes performance art.

The criticism from the government has given the public the impression that performance art is unhealthy. The Chinese art market has been growing rapidly since 2003, but performance art is still not accepted by the market. For these two reasons, Chinese performance art has been an outcast from art circles; fewer and fewer artists focus on performance art. But I believe now is the best time for real performance artists to show their attitude toward culture.

The primary principle of my performance is to express real feelings and thoughts that are universal. And then the creative language should be experimental.

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Yu Jian-Rong

Because of greed, human beings always want the best interest for themselves, and not for others. Unfortunately, this seems to be regarded as the drive for human progress. The world today cannot bear any more of humans’ greed. People are exhausted by their own never-ending desire and caught up in this vicious circle. If things come from void and eventually return to void, what is there to be gained in this material world, what can we actually change?

When art comes to a point where only the concept lives, art reaches the point of abyss. But art would not really end. In a piece of work, what is left or what can really be presented? I think what’s left would not be just a concept, or a show to satisfy senses, certainly not a display of pure skills. It would be a combination, an integration. So I see art as a dialogue, hoping to find a meeting point or a point of conflict, through my relationship with concepts, materials, forms, and techniques. To enlighten viewers, or to confuse them, or to appease them. With this dialogue, I want to deduct, but not to the point of complete nothingness. The rules are simple, like what Leonard Koren says in his book Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, “Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.”

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Odette England

The Ishihara Color Test is the most common clinical test for red-green color vision deficiencies in humans. It comprises 38 plates, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size, which form a number that is visible to people with normal color vision. However, the number in the dots is invisible, or difficult to see, for those with a red-green color vision defect. But, like mirages and memories, the Ishihara numbers are just optical phenomena. Each shows an image of things elsewhere, where refraction and reflection coexist and, to some extent, can be captured on camera.

My project, Attentional Landscapes, undertakes quasi-scientific experiments by photographically stripping and manipulating intended meaning and function. I combine the original plates from an Ishihara test book with family snapshots. A mutated memorial results in ambiguity through neutrality and absence, where vision and memory are simultaneously reduced and enlarged.

My paternal grandfather, who loved family photographs, had monochromacy, the rarest form of color blindness for which there is no treatment or cure. It meant that he could see only shades of black, gray, and white, as in a black-and-white movie or photograph. One of his favorite sayings was “the gray horse always wins.” It was only as an adult that I understood what he meant.

Thus in this body of work I seek to question observation, exposure, recognition, insight, and all the contexts of memory and contemporary culture with which we are bombarded by ever-increasing amounts of visual stimuli, and yet in which there are always varying shades of gray.

This work is inspired by the research of Professor Boris Velichkovsky, whose paper, Attentional landscapes and phasic changes of fixation duration in picture perception, discusses how memories and emotions are linked to how people visually perceive different scenes.

My work deals with meditations on identity and time, as well as the themes of personal and historical memory. I explore how we perceive memory, and how little we understand about its intimate relationship to location, mood, and geographical limits.

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