Gerald Collings “Electric Bogeyman”
Envoy Enterprises (87 Rivington St.)
This event has ended.
envoy enterprises presents Electric Bogeyman, the third solo exhibition of new paintings by Gerald Collings.
Collings’ work is situated within the more familiar traditions of landscape and figure painting. He breaks down the Renaissance ideal of the perfect representation of human figures and landscape through mathematical knowledge and puts it through a blender.
The humans represented in Collings’ portrait paintings are nightmarish creatures that seem to have been made out of joined and morphed figures. By making vegetation inseperable from animal life, he creates amorphous and fantastic natural forms that resemble some strange combination of human, animal and vegetable forms. They are a symbolic representation of the humanity of animals and the brutality of man as well as the vegetative commonality of all living creatures.
His faintly sinister landscapes are preoccupied with biomorphic shapes pitched against stark backdrops often executed in bright colors. Most striking about these forms is that they seem at once familiar yet completely unidentifiable. Highly textured, not in the sense of loosely dripped paint but by highly controlled play in the application of paint, these images seem like snapshots of mysterious, primeval places that seem to hold dark secrets.
A clear example of this is ‘Life’s A Hot Dog’: Fleshy shapes give the setting a certain physicality, while a solid turquoise sky suggests the infinite. Each twisted shape in the loop seems on the brink of changing into its neighbor, or into something else. In this never-ending cycle, birth and rebirth are products not of biology but of the artist’s and viewer’s imaginations.
Collings’ Paintings, for all their strangeness, strive for overall coherence. By implementing a stylistic syntax, Collings creates recognizable links between his works that simultaneously form a stylistic unity and the genesis of his fascinating and far-reaching aesthetic.
Gerald Collings was born in 1974 in Tampa, Florida. He lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited at museums such as the HISK in Ghent, Belgium, the Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida and in galleries in New York and Paris.
[Image: Gerald Collings “MAXIMUS” (2013)]
Media
Schedule
from January 12, 2014 to February 16, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-01-12 from 16:00 to 18:00