NYAB Event - Gabriel Lima “life, vest ; coffee, tray”

Gabriel Lima “life, vest ; coffee, tray”

Kai Matsumiya

This event has ended.

“It was like this: the country is at 11 a.m. Superficially like the backyard is green, of the most delicate superficiality. Green, green– green is a backyard. Between green and I, the water in the air. The green water of the air. I see everything through a full glass. Nothing is heard throughout the rest of the house, the shadow is swollen. The ripe superficiality. It is 11 a.m. in Brazil. It is exactly the hour. Now is time swollen upon its limits, 11 a.m. has no depth. 11 a.m. is full of hours till the rim of the green glass. Time quivers like a still balloon. The fertile and pursy air. Until during a national anthem, the strike of 11:30 will unmoor the balloon and we find ourselves in noon– that will be green like this hour.”
-Excerpt from “The Passion According to G.H.” by Clarice Lispector, 1964

Gabriel Lima’s debut exhibition in New York City presents a series of works on canvas conditioned by a sustained inquiry into the author Clarice Lispector.

Both artists can be understood to exist in a realm of radical equivalencies— playing with ideas of repetition and death, narrative and logic, perspective and presence, object and subject, universal and solitary, mundane and extraordinary, micro and macro, all dualities which are paradoxically presented and broken down, both Lima and Lispector surpass the formal tenets of their given media—the result is disorientation that allows for a space of contemplation. All such formal elements and themes, rather than being relations within containers or arenas in which Lima’s art practice may be understood, the artist reveals the tissue of relations which are themselves volatilized by such relations.

Lima’s amorphous abstractions—rendered via a slow layering of oil, tempera, and acrylic paints in varying shades and densities of naturalistic tones, and stabilized by quasi-patterns and repeats—simultaneously recall greatly magnified organic matter as if viewed through a microscopic lens, and exospheric mappings as if viewed from the stars. Seven of these panels, most of which the artist describes as being more natured than labored are installed horizontally along one wall of the first room in the gallery. This aspect of the installation juxtaposes the experience of linear time with mediated experience. The spectator is then confronted with a work placed by the entrance into the second room. This work in turn incorporates all material and thematic elements of the seven panels, some of which are segregated as if resolved on its own terms, while the others are more heavily layered, resulting in the greater appearances, effects, and consequences of restrained labor, psychological realities, and mechanical creations.

The second room in the gallery contains works which are not visible from the entrance of the gallery representing a pause amidst the enveloping experience of the first room. The mundane is often overseen and not always accessible, yet may assault upon the initiated encounter, and comfort after enough accounts. Akin to an instantaneous spasm or rupture that is relieved after identification and then recognition.

The third, final room reveals one panel from the vantage point of entering gallery 1 and gallery 2. The work is not fully visually visible until entering the room, and again the ordinary and the mundane are subtly juxtaposed, integrated, and questioned. Work on cardboard is graced with natural formed crystals that are yet mischievously stained as to achieve the appearance of the sublime natural mediated by fabricated perversions; one becomes the other without a complete transformation, and always in the process of actively defining each other.

Gabriel Lima was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1984. He has a BA in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union, USA, and MA in painting from The Royal College of Art, UK. Recent solo shows include Autêntico at Union Pacific, London, UK, 2015; Hanoi, Hanoi at Múrias Centeno, Lisbon, Portugal, 2015; and Us and Them at Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil, 2014. He also works collaboratively with other artists, he is the co-creator of the independent platform Postcodes in São Paulo, and his writing has appeared in exhibitions in Brussels, Lisbon, and São Paulo.

Media

• Painting

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