PAUL CHIAPPE

10 July - 9 August 2008

Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.[1]

MADDER139 is delighted to announce the first London solo show of Edinburgh artist, Paul Chiappe. In a series of hyperrealist drawings Chiappe questions our illusion between subject and object. Taking information from various settings; the traditional school photograph, books, vintage postcards, and particularly internet image searches, Chiappe alters and recreates the scrupulous and clinical precision of the camera with pencil to then blur and smudge into indeterminate plots and characters. The detailed and definitive use of the pencil sidles with the work of Chuck Close, however, unlike Close and his photorealist contemporaries, Chiappe's transcribed scenes hold narratives that highlight the shifting and fragile nature of memory.

In Untitled 12, a drawing sourced from google, Chiappe creates a macabre, ethereal setting as a bleak American Church School stands empty except for a girl who rigidly watches from the porch. Is she a schoolgirl or an apparition? The juxtaposition of the blurred, soft edge of the building against the crisp execution of the girl's stance at the entrance creates a nostalgic distance between viewer and piece.

In Untitled 18 an anonymous woman glares out and despite the absence of eyes appears tangibly real. Echoing Gerhard Richter's 'blur' technique from his photographic paintings of the sixties, Chiappe smears away the manicured backgrounds that he has created to produce out of focus scenes that drift back and forth and like a faded negative the works' edges disappear and overflow into a sinister no-man's land.

Chiappe's recent drawings compared to their photographic originals are vastly diminished in size, with some so meticulously small that they are a mere dot on the page and the use of a magnifying glass is required. By disrupting his subjects in exactitude and size Chiappe blots and dilutes the division between illusion and reality, with the pieces reading like a fleeting conception or the presence of a memory that we were told, but never had.

Paul Chiappe has recently exhibited at The Fleming Collection's 'Ten Decades' exhibition in Mayfair, London. Simultaneously to his show at MADDER139 Chiappe will be exhibiting at 'Kaleidoscope', a major exhibition of works on paper at The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, from 15th July - 21st September 2008, where he will be placed alongside Douglas Gordon, Richard Long, Ben Nicholson and Simon Starling.
 
[1]Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 147

Image:

Paul Chiappe

UNTITLED

2005

Pencil on Paper

10cm x 14cm 

Courtesy of the artist and MADDER139, London 

 
MADDER139
137-139
Whitecross St
London, EC1 Y 8JL

 

 

 

 

microwave, six

10 July 2008 to 13 Sept 2008

Kamrooz Aram, Ernesto Caivano, Graham Dolphin, Jacob Dyrenforth, Stephen Eichhorn, Alexandra Grant, Jim Hodges, Károly Keserü, Brian Lund, Rivane Neuenschwander, Renato Orara, Jesse Pasca, Andrew Scott Ross, Casey Jex Smith, Dean Smith, Allyson Strafella, Phoebe Washburn

Josée Bienvenu gallery is pleased to present microwave, six, an exhibition of drawings by seventeen artists who set up various processes of fragmentation and erosion of information. Close attention is given to execution, a concentration on the production process itself. A microwave is useful everyday to cook fast, or once a year to look at slow drawings. Since 1999, the (almost) annual edition of microwave has been an opportunity to confirm the emergence of a new attitude. As an alternative to an inhospitable era, microwave identifies an international host of artists who commit to the obscene activity of paying attention. With intense focus, patience and precision, the artists in microwave document the relentless propagation of delicacy as a subversive attitude.

Ernesto Caivano, Dean Smith, Károly Keserü and Renato Orara bring drawing to an extreme, as a sort of "maximalism." Through the endless weaving of minute components, they accumulate signals and vibrations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. Tones, hues, and shades combined with density, shapes, and intangible forms result in a grand yet subtle game, always remaining just a fragment of a whole. With obsessive attentiveness to detail, Jim Hodges, Stephen Eichhorn and Kamrooz Aram subvert the conventions of monumental practice, poetically linking evanescent moments in works of self-confident beauty.

The works in the exhibition touch upon the very fragile nature of communication and exchange. Allyson Strafella's typewritten drawings on transfer paper, Alexandra Grant's multilayered wordscapes or Rivane Neuenschwander's Ze Carioca altered comic books, explore ways of recording, fragmenting and obliterating information to create new non-verbal narratives. Data manipulation is also at the core of Brian Lund's graphic translations of film sequences and of Jesse Pasca's charted drawings: Moore's Law, My Heart as a Stock Market and How To Be Human, map the correlation between human activity and systems of scientific data.

Through minor operations on paper the artists in microwave disturb established systems of expectations. Jacob Dyrenforth's pixilated pencil drawings of crowds at rock and roll concerts and Graham Dolphin's scripted vinyl records disrupt and reprocess the clichéd aspirations of popular culture and the glamour industry. Growing up in Utah in the Mormon Church, Casey Jex Smith explores narratives in ancient scripture. Andrew Scott Ross' Re-Collections inventory given museums. Randomly floating in space, artifacts are depicted in a constant curatorial drift, suspended from interpretation and hierarchy. Phoebe Washburn exposes generative systems based on absurd patterns of production. With their elaborate notations and coding, the un-monumental drawings are microcosms of her convoluted architectural environments.

Image:
Jacob Dyrenforth, Crowd #3, 2008
pencil on paper

 

 

June 20th through August 1st, 2008

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Wendy White.
For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wendy White has produced a body of work that is visually striking, physically confrontational and intellectually engaging. White's compositions utilize a distinctive abstract language that alludes to the bombardment of the everyday. Urban sprawl, space junk, graffiti, buried hazardous material, and the accumulation of refuse are punctuated by heavy black areas that map a direct trail from the ubiquitous to the subconscious.

Unafraid to conjure real feeling and emotion in these works, White gives new form to the bombast of rock concerts and the mass elation of sports arenas. Built organically and intuitively, these works balance accident and scrappy paint handling with compositional coherence. While White seems to work with reckless abandon, her off-kilter compositions prove well considered with time, though perhaps deliberately confounding. Just when one begins to get involved in a lush patch of painterly abstraction, a field of blank white canvas, almost large enough to topple the composition, is encountered. Flatness combats depth, black is balanced against white, and fluorescent colors fade and emerge on top of a surface that is consistently finessed.

Wendy White has an MFA from Rutgers University. She has been honored with several awards including a 2005 George & Helen Segal Foundation Grant and a 2003 Space Program Studio Grant from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York, NY. She has had previous solo exhibitions at Sixtyseven in New York and Solomon Projects in Atlanta. Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Markus Winter in Berlin, Thrust Projects in New York and Galeria Moriarty in Madrid, where she is preparing for a solo exhibition in 2009. Wendy White lives and works in New York City.

Summer gallery hours will remain the same as usual gallery hours which are Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
 
Image:
Wendy White
Radio Blooper, 2008
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
50 x 70 inches

 

Courtesy of the artist and Leo Koenig Inc, New York 

Leo Koenig Inc.
545 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

 

  

ROBERT GUTIERREZ
Memory & Lore

June 28 - August 2, 2008

Sister is pleased to announce the opening of Memory & Lore, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Robert Gutierrez.  Fusing Filipino folklore and animism, Gutierrez's works are an amalgam of the dystopic mental landscape and a disjointed, fantastical narrative, often presenting multiple narratives that unfold within a single work.  Thematically, the works range from the transmogrified idyllic to an almost serene harmony of sexuality, violence, and chaos.  Gutierrez weaves together these themes through his distinctive sense of composition and attention to detail.

 

 

Sister
437 Gin Ling Way
Los Angeles, CA 90012

 

 

 

August 27-28 - Painting & Drawing
September 5 - Mixed Media
September 10-11 - Photography, Film & Video
September 17-18 - Sculpture & Installation