NYAB Event - David Trulli "Second Nature"

David Trulli "Second Nature"

Foley Gallery

This event has ended.

Foley presents the first New York solo exhibition of Los Angeles based artist David Trulli.

We feel a certain dislocation or disorientation as we look through a Trulli landscape. There coexists strange and familiar feelings; both comforting and unsettling. He creates a world somewhere removed from the life that we know, yet filled with recognizable scenes from a text book suburbia...a child on a swing, a woman hanging clothes to dry. We question the light, it's source, wondering if this world's inhabitants are above or beneath the surface of their world. Is it mother earth or a distant planet where we have taken refuge from our own atrocities? Or perhaps a vacation destination where we can feel alive with the simple pleasures in a safe environment from a dangerous world?

Trulli states, Humans are adaptable creatures, yet we often adapt our surroundings to us instead of adapting to our surroundings. When the world gets too complex, we try to disguise it to fit some past era, some simpler time. We build modern shopping malls filled with multi-national retailers, but make them look like the main street of some small town of long ago. We ride gondolas in Venice canals... built inside a Vegas casino. Politicians want to lead us into the future by assuring us that they will return us to the "good old days" of the past. All of my work on some level deals with our expectations of the future based on promises made in the past.

Trulli works exclusively in scratchboard. After coating smooth board with white clay, he applies a black ink finish. He works the surface with a stylus, taking away the black to reveal the white. drawing carefully by hand, using no measuring devices other than the occasional straightedge.
He compares this technique to lighting a film set: "It starts out black and you add light." Trulli blends his experience as a cinematographer with his admiration of the master wood-engravers of the 1930's, to produce intricate works that resemble film noir scenes or graphic novels. This hybrid embraces the chiaroscuro aesthetic of contrast between light and dark.