Paola Angelini: Newborn From Fire and Ashes - Lyles and King

    Italian artist Paola Angelini's paintings light up the atmosphere of the gallery, nestled in bustling Chinatown. At first glance, the saturated colors of Angelini’s palette overwhelm us with information. Her compositions comprise figures that are mostly female, some without clear identity at all, described only as hazy silhouettes with subtle features. The more prominent of Angelini's figures stare out, holding seemingly heroic positions, unlike the vague figures existing in separate, ambiguous dimensions. Angelini incorporates recurring motifs such as rearing horses, carved statues, dancers, and demons inspired by 20th century statuary and The Apocalypse Tapestries (1373-82), whose scenes depicted battles between angels and beasts, destruction and death. Her recent work challenges the context of the medieval tapestries by bringing forth a marriage between evil and beauty, portraying women as symbols for rebirth. 

    Angelini’s process is essential to the works and aids her narrative style. As one moves closer to the surface, through the saturated red and violet hues, rippling creases and cracks can be noticed beneath the painted surface. Angelini uses rabbit glue, plaster, and chalk on linen to thicken her surfaces. After allowing them to dry in the sun, cracks appear naturally once the moisture evaporates. In some cases, such as her work titled, Woman Sundressed, 2022, separate pieces of primed canvas are sewn together, another reference to the tapestries themselves. This skin-like surface not only brings life to her work, but adds an extra dimension to her atmospheric compositions.

     Nearly every square inch of Angelini’s paintings are filled with information. Her use of loud, saturated color and overlapping imagery envelops the viewer, who may argue that her paintings are too busy. Is the sense of narrative clear? Or do the elements of her compositions overstimulate those who are looking?

 

-Moira Kelly (final draft)

Katelyn Ledford: Please as Punch

Katelyn Ledford's Pleased as Punch was a decadent and eclectic view at visual recall of childhood imagery and the exacerbated imagination of the mind and its relation to object-hood. A contrasted approach to color and detail, Ledford's work locks in the line-of-sight with the intrigue of saturation and collection, emphasized with detail. The first painting upon entry - a high school desk, seen from below decorated with gum, quick-handed drawings and taped lighters - as if zoomed in with precise detail and imagined in a world of illustration and hyper-clarity. The near life-size stature of these paintings brings us to attention with the acutely precise linework that exhibits a photo-like quality. Further into the gallery space, another work stands out from the rest. A toy infant placed in a doll house of varied dimensions and assorted environments placed inside. The dollhouse appears set alight, the culprit loose match laying in front - the fire bringing the mind to alarm and holding us with the work, the viewer wonders "what's going on?" 

It is this kind of absurdity that carries throughout the gallery space although on different notes. In an interview with The Art Gorgeoous, Ledford describes her work as "tart, pseudo, and thwart." These words of emphasis, allusion, and distraction accumulate in ideation that is consistently present with the selected works on view at the latest installation. Ledford impresses and intrigues. 

Leo Holmes

Kate Clark: Only One Rule

Kate Clark's Only One Rule is like a strange little zoo tucked into Chelsea. The gallery feels small in comparison to the towering taxidermied sculptures: stacked antelope busts, two full sized zebras, and a huddle of coyotes, all of which have haunting sculpted human faces covered with patches of animal hide, and large unblinking eyes. In addition to these pieces, Only One Rule also shows a bear's bust and a few collages, which depict hyper-realistic drawings of Clark's sculptures surrounded by bursts of colorful, graphic silhouettes of animal horns.  

Clark, a Brooklyn-based artist, specializes in such sculptures, which invite the viewer to consider the relationship between humans and animals, pushing our understandings of gender, identity, and race. Clark's work is shocking, even unpleasant and uncanny at first. Nonetheless, these sculptures raise important ideas about speciesism and expose our anthropocentric tendencies.

While Only One Rule is intriguing, it is also somewhat hypocritical in its exploration of power dynamics between humans and animals. The reason why she is able to create these sculptures from previously living creatures is because they have been killed. Were these taxidermy animals obtained humanely? Does her work honor the lives of the animals whose bodies she's sculpted? If she is pointing out how we value human lives over animal lives, does her practice itself reduce animals into objects to be altered and displayed? Ultimately, these ethical dilemmas are important to consider, in terms of the ways her work may also operate because of the mistreatment of animals.

Brittney Fang, Revised

Rodrigo Valenzuela New Works for a Post-Worker’s World

 

Rodrigo Valenzuela is not only a photographer, but a builder of worlds. 

Valenzuela’s work is informed by his experience  immigrating to the US as an adult from Santiago, Chile. These cogs, beams, chains struggle for leverage in a deeply inhuman space,  serving as fantastic visual metaphors for exploring working class struggles, inequality, and the commodification of the human body.

His images serve as documents of invented surrealist spaces of intertwined machinery. Each of these scenes is confined in a small, concrete room without windows.

These black and white images serve a documentarian purpose: to showcase objects alive with brutal struggles, many of which are hard to define as anything other than mechanical parts- their original purposes are undefined. These various parts, such as chains, screws, and blades are hard to imagine as functional in the way they are laid out, instead a haunting, mysterious aura surrounds them. 

Valenzuela’s images are not hung on the wall. Instead, they are supported by wooden scaffolding. This choice in assembly removes the work from a typical gallery presentation, into a more industrial context, as though to build on this notion of a world devoid of humanity, and repopulated by machines.

 

 

revised version 

 

Audrey Doyle 

Charles Atlas: The Mathematics of Consciousness

The Mathematics of Consciousness is a video projection piece by Charles Atlas,shown at Pioneer Works. 

I went into the theater after reading the artist's statement, curious to see what Atlas had to say about the 

science of perception and the human mind. The projection was a mix of video footage and computer 

motion graphics, displayed on the large brick wall of the warehouse. Windows acted as frames for smaller

video clips within the projection. Narration explained how human perception is the result of chemical 

reactions in the brain; how memory is the product of neurons firing in the brain; and how what we perceive

to be real is dependent on what we collectively decide is real. These concepts were a backdrop for videos 

of dances and performances, some of which were taken from TikTok. The piece asks the viewer to 

question what exactly they are seeing, but it is also careful to not provide any concrete answer. We as the 

audience have to do the mental work of piecing everything together, and our conclusions are a reflection of 

our own perceptions. Altas’ work feels absurdist and existentialist and it sticks with me. The scale of the 

projection dwarfs the viewer, but the conceptual core of the piece dwarfs the ego.

Justin Caguiat: Carnival

Second Revision:

    The large paintings of Justin Caguiat’s Carnival sweep the viewer into a sea of colorful circular motifs, vague human figures, and translucent rectangles painted in oil and gouache on unstretched linen. These pieces present imagery that is both unapologetically decorative and rich in references to a range of international art-historical topics. The work prompts questions about what can be decoded as a subject or pattern, and whether these conclusions are essential in the process of looking.

    Stretching from practically floor to ceiling is Caguiat’s Daisyworld: a gridlike composition of seemingly abstract forms in primarily green and orange, ornamented with multicolored shapes. Looking closely, one may identify imagery in the forms, such as human bodies or window panes. Daisyworld’s play between abstraction and representation invites the viewer to stop and engage fully. Not only to interpret the shapes, symbols, and figures in the work, but to delight in the sensory experience of looking at the manipulation of paint.

    The works in Carnival represent a delicate balance between the figuratively legible and the conceptually opaque. The viewer sees forms and bodies that they may project meaning onto, but without the context that would allow one to assign a precise definition to any element. It is like putting together a puzzle in which the pieces form no clear picture, but elicit a profound and gratifying visual experience nonetheless.

Revision:

    The large paintings of Justin Caguiat’s Carnival sweep the viewer into a sea of colorful circular motifs, vague human figures, and translucent layered rectangles painted in oil and gouache on unstretched linen. These pieces present imagery that is both unapologetically decorative and rich in references to a vast range of international art-historical topics. The work poses questions about what can be decoded as a subject or a pattern, and whether these conclusions are essential in the process of looking.

    Caguiat’s Daisyworld is a gridlike composition of seemingly abstract forms in primarily green and orange, ornamented with small multicolored shapes. Over time, one may pick out recognizable imagery in the forms, such as human bodies or window panes. Daisyworld’s play between abstraction and representation invites the viewer to stop and look closely. Not only to interpret the shapes, symbols, and figures in the work, but to delight in the sensory experience of looking at the manipulation of paint.

    The works in Carnival represent a delicate balance between the figuratively legible and the conceptually opaque. The viewer sees forms and bodies that they may project meaning onto, but without the context that would allow one to assign a precise definition to any element. It is like putting together a puzzle in which the pieces form no clear picture, but elicit a profound and gratifying visual experience nonetheless.


Original:

    The large paintings of Justin Caguiat’s Carnival instantly sweep the viewer into a sea of color, texture, and pattern painted in oil and gouache on unstretched linen. These boldly colored works present imagery that is both unapologetically decorative and rich in concept, stemming from a vast range of international art-historical reference material. They pose questions about what can be identified as a subject or a pattern, and whether these conclusions are essential in the process of looking.

    Caguiat’s Daisyworld presents a gridlike composition of seemingly abstract forms in primarily green and orange, ornamented with small multicolored shapes. With time, one may pick out recognizable imagery from the forms, such as figures or window panes. Daisyworld’s play between abstraction and representation invites the viewer to stop and look closely. Not only to decode the shapes, symbols, and figures in the work, but to delight in the sensory experience of looking at the manipulation of paint. 

    The works in Carnival represent a delicate balance between the interpretable and the conceptually opaque. The viewer sees forms and bodies that they may project meaning onto, but without the context that would allow one to assign a precise definition to any element or entire work. It is like putting together a puzzle in which the pieces form no clear picture, but elicit a profound and gratifying visual experience nonetheless.

Hank Willis Thomas: Everything We See Hides Another Thing

Hank Willis Thomas: Everything We See Hides Another Thing

Jack Shainman Gallery, 20th Street

        My experience with Hank Willis Thomas has always bordered on love and hate. His work is so suggestive, so provocative yet so accessible and not necessarily in a good way. Hanks' work is not defined by one medium and even though he is traditionally thought of as a photographer, his best work often is sculptural. This show is no exception, I find the photography which makes up the majority of the exhibition to be rather lackluster. It clearly deals with themes of civil disobedience, the lgbtq+ and other groups like many other contemporary artists are making work about. Thomas has always been an artist who makes work that is easily accessible for the general public to understand and derive the meaning from; however this show seems overly accessible and leaves little room for interpretation. The themes are clear and easy to spot and while to many casual observers might like this about the show, to the more practiced art observer it comes across as dull. 

This show isn't all negative though, there are some redeeming qualities, there are clear references to great artists of the past such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. In addition to these references, his show is incredibly innovative with its use of retro reflective material in order to create a different perspective when the artwork is photographed using flash.