EUTOPIA

The State of the Arts

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Cooper Union, State of the Arts

The State of the Arts
The Annual Exhibition of Students’ Work
Cooper Union New York, NY [link]
May 22-June 10th, 2018

Isolation is decidedly solitary- in social terms: withdrawn, distant, non conformist, resistant, … etc. Qualities that have served the school to set itself apart: on the one hand devising a pedagogical framework unfazed by the proliferation of spectacular images of a pseudo-technological stance;  on the other hand in stark contrast to the increasing venues of garish art fairs and such the show is a hinged décollage of architecture, art, and engineering departments foregrounded as a singular collaborative act that -together with its tentative onlooker- reveals the patent rift between genuine enquiry versus an intrinsically kitsch itinerary of culture industry.

~ Ali Soltani
Photos : Soltani+LeClercq

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Aphrodite Désirée Navab

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Aphrodite Désirée Navab
“THE HOMELING”
Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY [link]
January 11th-February 17th, 2018
Curated by: Roxana Fabius

It is only afterwards- with the realization that these saturated Piranesi-esque inscriptions on paper are indexical marks of the artist’s body– that the encoded thing is decoded to an uprooted buoyant identity leaving its trace in sporadic leaps on paper, then into the subconscious of the viewer where the notions of gender and ethnicity take form and are torn asunder. This is followed in the casually hung drawings where suffused delineations of nuances marked by paper’s absorption recall Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup, invoking both a fetishistic assault on the Freudian phallus and a partial vestige of the body on paper.

~ Ali Soltani
Photographs courtesy Johannes Vogt Gallery

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John Hejduk

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John Hejduk
Jan Palach Memorial [link]
Cooper Union, New York

House of Suicide and House of Mother of Suicide

As architectural meditations, John Hejduk’s constructions are uncharacteristically rootless- tentative inhabitants that stir a moment till eternity, elusive appearances that despite their eventual departure, are forever marked in memory. Inspired by David Schapiro’s poem, two spiky structures at a distance mark an immutable act – paying tribute to Jan Palach who in 1968 set himself on fire in protest of the Soviet’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, and to his mother. Concurrently, against a newly deleterious milieu imbued by demoralizing declarations of intolerance, they are the incarnated spirit of freedom; and in New York, finally, a binding reminder of events and memorial.

~ Ali Soltani

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Laetitia Soulier

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The Fractal Architectures series

Laetitia Soulier “The Matryoshka Dolls 2″_40in x 80in_C Print, courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery

 

Laetitia Soulier
Fractal Architectures
Claire Oliver Gallery, New York [link]
February 26- April 9, 2016

I am reminded of the perspectival loom of the Quattrocento period in early Renaissance when viewing the pictures of Laetitia Soulier as though experiencing a subliminal stroboscope that rapidly alternates between a still shot and it’s underlying mathematical lattice-work on which it is constructed. The viewer is plunged into a kinematic rotorelief of pulsating fractals and figures that through a juxtaposition of contrasting scales is effectively internalized, subject to the same perceptive inquisition it employed to examine things. The installation serves as a threshold to an un-folding itinerary from where one emerges like a charged Baudlairean kalaidoscope gifted with consciousness.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery

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Marco Maggi

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Marco Maggi_Two Pages, 2015, Self-adhesive archival paper on wall, Dimensions variable, view two

Marco Maggi_Two Pages, 2015, Self-adhesive archival paper on wall, Dimensions variable, view two

Marco Maggi
Unfolding Marco Maggi
Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York [link]
September 10 – October 24, 2015

Entering the work of Marco Maggi is not too unlike the dichotomous trajectory of a Zeno’s paradox where the elusive sight of knowledge always lies half a step ahead. The intriguing force of the granulated opalescent field that draws the gaze to its orbit is as though the intricate construction of signs that inscribe the space they inhabit, are the molecular building blocks of some gigantic meta-language; the pencils like the needles of a seismograph machine are there to record the slightest slippages and we’re brought in to witness the immaculate silence of language before it erupts into a scream.

~ Ali Soltani

Images courtesy of the artist and Josée Bienvenu Gallery

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Ryder Richards

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RRichards_final hoodie

Ryder Richards “Shield:Defense” kevlar hoodie [2015]

Ryder Richards
a thing of this world
Public Address, Brooklyn [link]

The striking aspect given the relational nature of power is the implicit presence of a subject through its absence; we see the instruments that compel obedience, the police, the guns, the blunt matter of fact-ness of a neatly folded Kelvar® hoodie, the field of conflict, but we don’t see the other side of it anymore than we can see ourselves. This intricate collection of works, as in the system of vowels and consonants in language, are joined in the likeness of “a thing of this world,” drawing on a priori aesthetics of partitions established between the law and its subject.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of Public Address and the artist

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