EUTOPIA

Grace Weaver

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Match Point, 2015

Grace Weaver
Teenage Dream
Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York [link]

Flesh, cast in warm limelight, is tangerine-strawberry in Teenage Dream. Grace Weaver’s paintings offer extracurricular mise en scènes, where bodies behave like stage props when they support, form, and “move” in response to their individual environments. In Match Point, buoyant arms and legs swoop around the painting’s periphery as if they were curtains unveiling the adversary of a higgledy-piggledy tennis game. Although the artist credits pop-songs to her narratives, the gestures of its jelly-like citizens also suggest they are in cadence with a Gladys Nilsson landscape or Matisse’s Dance II; the figures bounce to a lyrical beat.

~ Amie Cunat
images courtesy of Thierry Goldberg Gallery

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Claudia Comte

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Claudia Comte
No Melon No Lemon
Gladstone Gallery, Chelsea, NY [link]
January 29-March 21, 2015

No Melon No Lemon proposes a comedic intersection of rigid geometry and playful biomorphism.  Dominant to the space is a rhythmic system of stark, yellow and white-striped mural paintings accompanied by the organic textures of carved reliefs—repeating lines run down the length of the plywood walls’ burnt, black surface.  Murphy bed-like plinths seem to “fold-down” from these partitions, each supporting a highly polished, wooden object. The sculptures, nodding to chunky loops and noodles, pumpernickel bagels, and Brancusi-totems, appear soft to the touch as much as they present a material hardness. The installation’s formal players reinforce a holistic optical vibrancy to its tactile nature.

~ Amie Cunat
images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery

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Amy Feldman

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images courtesy of Amy Feldman and Blackston Gallery

images courtesy of Amy Feldman and Blackston Gallery

Amy Feldman
High Sign
Blackston Gallery, New York [link]

The gallery walls and ceiling are painted grey emphasizing the object-presence of Amy Feldman’s paintings. Within her large canvas works, Feldman’s process supplants causality. Dark grey forms painted against a white ground structure an exchange between the formal vacancies and positives of image, while the immediacy of their gestures with moments of careless paint drippings, punctuates the motifs as if they were exclamatory statements. Emblematically, the alliteration among titles like Gut Smut, Psych Alike, Spirit Merit, and Open Omen stress the play in her visual rhetoric, which emulate behaviors of cartoon-like call-out bubbles, humpty-back camels, and oceanic tribal masks.

~ Amie Cunat

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Etel Adnan

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Etel Adnan
Callicoon Fine Arts, NY, NY [link]
April 3-May 23, 2014
also exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial 2014 [link]

Like Paul Cezanne whose renditions of Mont Sainte-Victoire cultivated the relationship between lived experience and perception, Etel Adnan oscillates between the poetic and philosophic among her recent abstract paintings. These small-scale works, numerous in quantity, inform landscapes while they symbiotically construct a condition of landscape. All of the works are untitled which direct their openness and rejection of pictorial signification. What the viewer sees is the interaction of muted aquamarine, cadmium green and flesh peach hues that connote a formal construction as much as a state of emotive happenstance. Blocks of color form the intangible relative to the way a horizon line is formed by a partnership of sky and earth.

~ Amie Cunat

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Erwin Wurm

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Erwin Wurm
Kiss (Abstract Sculptures)
Synthesa @ Lehmann Maupin, Chelsea, NY [link]
February 28 – April 19, 2014

Presented atop gallery-white pedestals, Erwin Wurm’s figurative objects stand wistfully erect. Wurm’s sculptures allude to a cheap liaison, formally reminiscent of a kitsch dolphins statuette, triumphantly erupting out of their simulated ocean. These cast-bronze “casings”, painted with matte, fleshy-like mauve acrylic, conduct dual associations in scale and metaphor: what are franks are served up as phalluses, what are deli meats perform as human limbs. Functioning like surrealist poetry where disparate objects and behaviors are incongruously aligned, the girth of the objects’ romance is implied by the degree of the “meat’s” actual entanglement. 

~ Amie Cunat

photo courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery