NYAB Event - “Take Note” Exhibition

“Take Note” Exhibition

frosch & portmann

This event has ended.

frosch&portmann presents Take Note, a group exhibition with Hugo Lugo, Jen Mazza, and Brad Nelson.

Take Note brings together 3 artists exploring formal aspects of the representation of process. The meticulous paintings of familiar everyday objects such as notebooks, legal pads or post-its reflect the re-creation of a throw away mass-product into a unique work of art. Here, preliminary thoughts, sketches or notes are transformed into final paintings.

Tijuana based artist Hugo Lugo is represented with “Study after Fontana”, a painting of a torn-out ruled notebook sheet, about 3 times its original size. Playing with scale, Lugo’s subject, the creator of the five red open cuts, seems lonely and almost disappears into the background; the work is a humorous homage. The artist explores formal aspects of language and representation to interrogate the subject’s role in the liminal space where drawing, painting and text converge to reveal the power dynamics inherent in the process of representation. Wordless but not without words, red gashes in the page reinvent language–reifying the systemic violence of creation, the corporeality of the transference of memory, and the dangerous possibilities which hide between the lines.

An avid reader, Jen Mazza (New York) is an artist seeing through writing. Her work is a reflection of her reading. In Mazza’s recent paintings, the words themselves have become the actual subject and are no longer solely a hidden but inspiring presence.
Jen Mazza paints her notes, re-presentations of what she sees filtered through her own consciousness. Using chromatic grays in the notebook paintings shown here, Mazza first creates the hard geometry of a notebook against canvas. This serves as the semi-abstract base from which she translates the visual into written content, and through another layer of translation–words back into paint. While there is a humorous irony at work in Mazza’s paintings, it is no less remarkable than their pathos. They remain open objects, demanding the viewer’s own participation in the translation process.

Brad Nelson’s paper paintings examine the transference of memories and ideas over time, especially the relationship between faith, instinct and truth. As an artist, Nelson wants to create a trompe l’oeil effect to allow the viewers to believe in something that connotes the same idea as the original, but to have a “truth” that is fleeting. He wants us to second-guess our instinctual, habitual way of viewing the world.
In his most recent work, “The Idea of Up”, graph paper lines create a vision of the sky–a holistic and spiritual understanding of the world, which is interrupted by a pinhole, denoting a break in comprehension. Inspired by nature, Nelson’s paintings express our interconnectivity, and seek to illuminate the impact we have on others. Nelson currently lives and works in Falmouth, MA.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

ADVERTISE ON NYAB