NYAB Event - “Things still left unsaid” Exhibition

“Things still left unsaid” Exhibition

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

This event has ended.

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery presents a three-person exhibition Things still left unsaid, featuring the works by New York City- based painters Vince Contarino, Jenna Ransom and Kenny Rivero. Through their respective, already highly accomplished practices, these three artists offer distinctive ways of utilizing abstraction in the medium of painting. Their approaches are grounded in the history of the 20th century abstract art, which gets interrogated and deconstructed. These legacies are fused in innovative ways with motifs from the artists’ surroundings, as well as their contemplations on personal and collective experiences of living in the city and how those can be translated into the surface of painting. Through their art works, the artists strictly defy an ongoing discourse about the end of painting, while discovering new potentials of abstraction as a means to talk about history, personal identity and contemporary living.

Jenna Ransom’s oil on canvas compositions capture surreal landscapes stemming from the artist’s dreams, memories and everyday experiences. Critical of today’s society, largely controlled by mass media and new technologies, Ransom aims to create dreamscapes that counteract these harsh realities. The interplay of multiple layers of paint and imagery suggests the ever-changing cycle of life and evolution. The paintings reveal the artist’s fascination with outsider art, as much as with the works of Abstract Surrealism. Fragments of floral motifs, anthropomorphic figures and ancient symbols, as well as the sky and sea waves are all intertwined in Ransom’s vibrant, ambiguous configurations, which are given suggestive and playful titles- words and phrases picked up from pop culture, literature and daily situations.

In Kenny Rivero’s paintings there are allusions to music, art, literature, as well as political history of New York City and Dominican Republic. The artist’s syncretic approach fuses text, color, found materials, collage techniques and paint into poetical, expressive and symbolically poignant works. While revealing Rivero’s investigation of Abstraction, Social Realism and Modern American Painting, the works render the anecdotes absorbed from the artist’s own family, collective memories of Dominican immigrants in New York City, as well as the artist’s personal views on complexities of contemporary diasporan identities.

Structure of painting, made through the juxtaposition of different elements and painting methods, is in the focus of Vince Contarino’s art practice. In his canvases, inspired by everyday situations, overheard conversations, and other things outside of his studio, constructed hard edge shapes are combined with more spontaneous, gestural marks made by brushes, plastic, paper, cardboard and other materials- each contributing a specific texture and quality to the whole composition. The thoughtful combinations of these two distinctive approaches to abstraction are enriched with various color effects, adding to the complexity of Contarino’s dynamic compositions, preoccupied with translating the sensory quotidian experiences into a different kind of image for the viewer.

[Image: Kenny Rivero “Cloud Thieves” (2012)]