NYAB Event - Amelie Mancini "Sacrebleu! Napoleon Would Have Made A Fine Shortstop"

Amelie Mancini "Sacrebleu! Napoleon Would Have Made A Fine Shortstop"

Yashar Gallery

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This newest series of paintings by Amelie Mancini takes its subjects from amongst some of Baseball's most talented figures: Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, Harvey Haddix, Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver.

Each portrait is made of six small canvases assembled into a larger painting and is a study of a baseball hero at the height of his greatness, hitting a home run, pitching a perfect game, stealing home. But theirs isn't just any baseball field: it is a world of empty houses and ancient arches, built with bright acrylic paint and faux-marble, obeying primal geometry and disturbed by spatial ambiguity, ruled by legends and reveries.

A French expatriate and therefore fundamentally an outsider, Amelie Mancini uses this series to probe at the quintessentially American game of baseball from a European point of view. Because she grew up without any knowledge of the game and its history, her attention is first captured by a melancholic face, a bulging bicep, a certain way to wear or lose a hat. Through free-associations and the use of motifs from other eras, she unveils a world marked by a familiar kind of eerieness and an ominous melancholy, unleashing the uncanny ghosts of great things past.