Matt Sheridan Smith “Cyclist Fig.2 Ep.1”
Andrew Kreps Gallery
This event has ended.
Together, these works attempt a sort of speculative portraiture. These portraits present themselves as so many still lives, backdrops, kits, all on hold, waiting for a performance that does not come. In playing on the conceptual and rhetorical limits of portraiture, the works, instead of combining signs, accumulate phantasmagorical residues: textures, patterns frozen in repetition, solid and liquid elements, objects and substances that depict presence and absence, fiction and fact,positing imagination and memory as nothing more than various states of viscosity.
Ottavio Bottecchia came to France and with his limited French insisted only: “No bananas, lots of coffee, thank you.” He rode a bicycle around the entire country, leading the entire way, clutching a timepiece whose value was only visible to him, and singing a song’s refrain: “I have seen the most beautiful eyes in the world but never as beautiful eyes as yours.” Hidden fixations traced a secret course. When he awoke in Toulon, set to race another day towards Nice, he decided against putting on the yellow leader’s jersey that was a right envied by every other rider, past and present. From the crudest of maps, a red circle showing the path of the 1924 Tour, minimally contoured, this stage of the tour has been drawn into a pattern.
A pattern, generally a form reserved for standing in for content, stands in instead for a figure, capable of prompting an emergence, yet always ready (perhaps likely) to retreat into the decorative. This movement is both encouraged and disrupted by the persistent presence of a rubbing, scratching, busy hand, entered from somewhere else, sensorially sketching out sometime else. Drawing empty, casting a hole: an absence, marked by recent presence, distant use, a hand, a scent, a touch.
The ending of the story should go like this: just three years after winning the Tour, Bottecchia’s body is found by the roadside near his home, skull cracked, collarbone broken. He had rose at dawn and asked for a bath and some soup to be ready upon his return. Speculation, false confessions, conspiracy theories spilled out like blood but the mystery is still just that. But these are just stories in the residues, a film over the eyes and a sticky moss in the mouths of those still present.
A map, a question mark, a line of runny blood: in this exhibition the contents of the paintings jump to the walls themselves, allowing frames to emerge wherein the pattern, huddled amongst other objects (an image of a stage as shown off-stage, coffee, sad bananas, cups to hold the presence of a hand), can also swap themselves, stand-in against themselves, cast holes of themselves. Things are hidden one-where, exposed else-where. These lesser bodies in space, they trace together the outlines of a setting, stand in for a scene, that refuses to declare whether it’s the station of arrival, awaiting its figure – a real body, whether warm or cold – or simply another staging/restaging of its own site of disappearance, another ghost.
Media
Schedule
from November 01, 2014 to January 10, 2015
Opening Reception on 2014-11-01 from 18:00 to 20:00