Image:
JAMES RYAN
Blockade, 2010
Acylic on fabric
100 x 75 cm

Courtesy of ROD BARTON, London

 

ROD BARTON
One Paget Street
London EC1V 7PA
T+44 (0) 7989437214
E info @ rodbarton.com
Open Saturday 12 - 6pm or by appointment.

 

 

 

 

solo show of paintings with moving image

SEP 3rd - OCT 17th 2010
(Open Thursday to Sunday 12-6pm)
 
Sean Branagan's work has a hint of the impossible but nearly graspable about it. He doesn't describe the world we know - i.e. he doesn't focus on the scaffolding, in which we communally invest, through language and social order to run our lives - an approach that delivers the comforting satisfaction of affirmation and recognition. Instead he attempts to breach 'The Real' [See Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.] - something that differentiates itself from what could be called 'artificial' to be more total, but which is also certainly discernible from the imaginary and fanciful.

 

As a vehicle for 'time', 'light' and 'movement' (elements which are as valid to his practice as more conventional ones of painting such as line, form and colour) the role of the projector has been variously considered in past pieces. For example, it was built inside the work in the LIGHT FORMS series, it was suspended closely overhead on clamps in works like 'Peep Show' and 'Where the Sun is Silent' (pieces recently seen in the group show PHYSICOLOGY at this gallery).

 

In those pieces light was always applied to the surface (via the projector).This exhibition sees the adoption of LCD screens, allowing light and movement to emanate from within the work. However, light is also applied externally onto the work; these paintings are lit from the front, and are to be seen in the full light of the gallery space, as in any other painting show.

 

'The ribbon'
Branagan describes the urge in his studio to hold one end of a ribbon and throw the other end outwards, through and into the work. This feels less about creating a navigable bridge between the tangible and intangible (because this assumes a difference, or a journey, that takes you from one thing, to another, different thing - the conceptual world of the painting and his own reality) it is more about an orchestration of seeing and feeling the work homogenously, about embracing the idea that perhaps there is no difference, perhaps there is only one thing - 'The Real'.

 

In 'Constructs in the Mind of a Sceptic', lines of drawing are conventionally applied onto the Perspex, as a painter might apply them to his canvas, but then they are also (unconventionally) applied at the filming stage as part of the figure's environment. As the figure moves, some of the lines are attached to her body and move to her will. We are presented with drawing that was made before filming took place; drawing made during the filming, by the figure as she moved/moves; drawing on the surface of the Perspex and finally drawing on the walls - created by the shadows that result from the surface, in places, being transparent.

 

"It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous." Jean Baudrillard.

 

Born in Old Trafford, England, Branagan studied for his BA at BIAD (Birmingham City University). He has received the Salford City Arts Bursary, 1st Prize; a studio practice grant from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York and an 'Art for Architecture' grant from the Royal Society of Arts. Solo shows include: Un-Still Life, 2009 at the Kusseneers Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; The Solo Project, 2009 & 2010 Basel, Switzerland; Painting with People II, 2008 at STUDIO ONE, the GRV, Edinburgh, Scotland; LIGHT FORMS, 2007 at VINEspace London. Group shows include:  Shibboleth, the Cafe Gallery Projects London; Painting Unlimited at APT Gallery London. In 2009 he exhibited in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, as part of ROMA, the Road to Contemporary Art. Sean Branagan lives and works in London.

 

For more information on this exhibition and Sean Branagan's work, please visit the GOODEN GALLERY website.

 

 

Image:
Sean Branagan

'Construct in the Mind of a Sceptic', 2010
Perspex sheeting, acrylic paint, LCD screen (moving image) 60cms x 70cms
Courtesy the artist and Gooden Gallery

 

 

GOODEN GALLERY
25A Vyner St
London
E2 9DG
T +44 (0)20 8981 1233
E office @ goodengallery.com

 

 

 

 

03 September - 9 October 2010

 

The Spanish artist Amparo Sard (* 1973) uses a variety of different media of expression for her work, such as drawing, video, installations and sculpture. In her "drawings", Sard embroiders stories on paper and provides plastic forms with a corpus to desecrate the bidimensionality of the support it is being created on. It is an absolute monochromatism, white, reminiscent of silence and loneliness and exploring themes of identity and restriction. By using a unique form of pointillism, Sard creates works on paper as well as space-filling sculptures fashioned out of a wide variety of materials. Her works consist of thousands of pinholes, forming complex illustrations, which can be qualified as "pixeled embroidery".

 

According to Amparo Sard, "my works on paper can be considered from two different perspectives. On the one hand, the images (suitcase, pipe, chair, fly, woman etc.) explain something within the predefined square of the sheet of paper. This may be interpreted freely by the observer. However, on the other hand there is the language I use, a raised language. It is a language which speaks of beauty; however which also communicates with the evil. The experience of an uncanny feeling, for example, arises when something appears to be alive, but which in reality is dead, such as would be the case with a wax figure or robots. Or vice versa, when something that should be alive has become an object, such as, for example, an amputated arm." According to Freud, the unsettling foreignness in Amparo Sard's work has something to do with that which has been repressed and readopted: In the end it is impossible for the domesticated and homely to conceal both its pulse-dimension and its abyss-dimension simultaneously. In Amparo Sard's paper works and videos it is not the cheerful games which predominate, but instead danger, loneliness and silence. It could almost be said, that this presentation is nearly invented. These emotional impulses succeed in piercing the immaculate surface, In order to make fear transparent through an almost palpable plea.

 

Works by Amparo Sard can be found in collections of the MOMA, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York and of the Deutsche Bank, Berlin and New York.

 

Galerie Voss dignifies the works of Amparo Sard by organizing the first solo exhibition in Germany.

 

The exhibition has been organized as a German premiere on the occasion of the Quadriennale 2010 in Düsseldorf.

 

 

Image:

Amparo Sard

 

 

Galerie Voss
Mühlengasse 3
D-40213 Düsseldorf
Germany
T +49 021113 49 82
E info @ galerievoss.de

 

 

 

 

September 3 - October 16, 2010

 

Galerie Stefan Röpke is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition for Spanish artist Jordi Alcaraz, on view September 3 to October 16, 2010.

 

With this new body of work, Jordi Alcaraz continues to play with dimension and spatial perception and illusion with a special attention on literature and the use of books. The essence of literature can be found in the written word laid upon paper. Ink is formed into letters, then into words, and further into text. As Alcaraz focuses on the material aspects of writing by reducing them to their physical elements for artistic and compositional purposes, there is a parallel between the work he creates and the literature that these materials represent; both transforming books, paper, and ink into windows for our imagination.

 

Jordi Alcaraz also continues to use familiar materials like plexi, mirrored orbs and substantial frames in creative and inventive ways to allow the play of light and shadows to be part of the compositions. And although the resulting works are serious and challenging, they are also always infused with humor and wit.

 

Jordi Alcaraz was born in Calella, Spain in 1963 and currently lives and works in Barcelona. His works have been shown at numerous exhibitions around the world, including the Museu de Pintura de Sant Pol de Mar and the Museu de Sabadell in Barcelona. A newly published and extensive catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

 

 

Image:

JORDI ALCARAZ

 

 

3 September - 23 October 2010

 

The Christian Lethert Gallery is pleased to be announcing recent works by artist Jorinde Voigt called Superdestinations (3 September 2010 - 23 October 2010), subsequent to the artist's previous shows at the Gallery with the titles Matrix & Lemniskate (2008) and Conglomerate (2007).

 

Jorinde Voigt (born in 1977 in Frankfurt am Main) has been developing conceptual drawings on paper since 2002, referring to them as notations and scores, and which form the core of her multi-faceted euvre consisting of photo works, performances, objects and (sound) installations. In her, for the most part, oversized notations, Voigt constructs an ordering system, as complex as it is individual, in order to urvey invisible processes in our present day. Whereas in her early drawings Voigt was searching for a way of writing that reacted as dynamically and lively as reality itself, the most recent drawings represent a educed writing system of drawing-like codes.

 

The pages display abstract lines that have been spontaneously drawn in colored pencil and scattered across the surface of the paper. The strokes form circles, rectangles, triangles, squares, straight, curvy, and zigzag lines. Only the titles of the works give us any indication of the origin of the notations. This is a concrete fixing of positions using the parameters of form and color, which Voigt synchronizes in Superdestinations: The object viewed is reduced to its simplest basic visual form by the artist at the moment of perception and then noted with the corresponding color. Just as a key on a keyboard roduces a specific tone, a colored pencil corresponds to the color scale 1-120 regarding the colorfulness of the respective object. In addition to the location, time also functions as a variable of the image production. Each stroke has been provided with a number that documents the succession of the objects perceived.

 

It is possible to draw a parallel from Superdestinations to Voigt's first sketch-like notations. In 2003, the artist traveled to Indonesia, where the three-part series Indonesia was carried out. Voigt used graph paper for the notation of her precise linear arrangement. Sitting in street cafés, she noted in the form of frequencies the sounds of motorbikes passing, the rising wind, Indonesian pop music and passers-by in conversation. Whereas Voigt exclusively dealt with acoustics in Indonesia, in Superdestinations her concern is exclusively for taking an optical inventory of the environment. A further key to the artist's studies in perception is the Installation Botanic Code, in which Voigt examined her own perception of colors during walks in botanic gardens. According to an algorithm, the most strongly perceived colors, recorded in an order of one to five, are translated into proportional color fields and transferred to aluminum rods. The result is a code, which breaks down the information with respect to color, proportion, performance, time, season and norm.

 

Botanic Code, as well as Superdestination, translates the human brain's linear structure of perception into a parallel arrangement. An unusual side-by-side of individual moments comes about, fanning out before our eyes in a simultaneousness of the present. The overlappings and intersections (accumulation) produce a rhythm (interference) that extends throughout Voigt's drawings. By repeating and varying the same unchanging procedure of notation, the inherent rhythm is pushed on.

 

In the element "Horizon" the theme of the elementary horizontal line upfolds to the color spectrum of possible horizon colors. The side-by-side of the possible lines results in an idiosyncratic complex of colors, which defines the possible scope of colors. This element bands together in the new works with themes of: melody, caesura, rotation, territory, continental border, center, water, oil, gas, electricity, direction, construction, deconstruction, temporal countdown and count-up loops, position, and double identical position.

 

Superdestinations is characterized by ambivalences: linearity and nonlinearity, specificity and non-specificity, writing and image. Even though the notations primarily concentrate on self-perception, nevertheless the location is an essential picture subject. As a rule, a location displays specific features of identity, whereas in Voigt's drawings it is simplified to a homogenous system of lines. The result of this unconventional manner of writing is something unknown. Reminded of children's, blind or scribbled drawings, we see something not yet defined: It is a stage before the categorization of image and writing. Intuitively, beyond emotion and intellect, the colored abbreviations reveal primal archaic forms of human communication, such as those examined in anthropological and neurological studies.

 

Text: Lisa Sintermann

 

 

Image:
JORINDE VOIGT
Courtesy of Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

 

 

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
D-50672 Cologne
Germany
T +49(0)221 3560590
E info @ christianlethert.com