“Valori Plastici” Exhibition
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
This event has ended.
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery presents Valori Plastici, a group exhibition that brings the tradition of Pittura Metafisica into a contemporary context through painting, sculpture, installation and photography. Borrowing its title from a Roman magazine, this exhibition includes work by Jesse Chapman, Jennifer Cohen, Kristen Jensen, Jill Mason, and Adam Putnam.
Known for the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrá, Pittura Metafisica was a short-lived movement that served as a predecessor to surrealism and a reaction to the extreme avant-garde of the early 1900’s. Influenced by Nietzsche’s theories of eternal
return, De Chirico and Cará attempted to access a mysterious ‘true reality’ in their work, masked by the experience of the banal. The strange, evocative paintings of this movement evoked a sense of dislocation between past and present and the individual subject and their inhabited space.
Jesse Chapman’s paintings are contextually elusive, yet characterized by recognizable iconography. Fictive spaces play host to ambiguous, expressionless figures while rituals are performed between the animate and inanimate. These oneiric territories become
governed by sharp contrasts of light and shadow that come together with time, to slowly reveal the disjointed strangeness of the human experience.
Jennifer Paige Cohen’s sculptures contain a corporeal material presence where implied movement becomes static through the transformation in her process. By incorporating textiles and personal effects (sweaters, pants and other remnants) into the work carnal
structures emerge, yet only an underlying shape of the figure remains.
Kristen Jensen createsintrospective relationships between material and form in her sculptural objects. The immediate and seductive physicality of the materials gives way to evocative representations of every day objects. The relationships that develop between
the forms offer literary clues suggesting an unfolding, shifting narrative that magnifies one’s perception and asks for careful attention.
Following an incongruous internal logic, the objects depicted in Jill Mason’s paintings are invested with anthropomorphic qualitiesthat are at once awkward and mutable. Painted in saccharine pinks, blues and browns, the most abstract of her pictoral elements develops personality, inhabiting a sort of spare parts world that is at once surreal, bathetic and whimsically abstract.
Considering the twin dimensions of space and memory, Adam Putnam’s recent work explores the boundary between exterior and interior spaces. Arches, columns and other follies are constructed from the barest of essentials in the hope of traversing the threshold between both a perceived and psychological experience of architecture.
Media
Schedule
from May 09, 2013 to June 09, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-05-11 from 18:00 to 20:00