ART NEWS: March 02

With “Dans la plantation” his new body of work, Marc Padeu pursues his pictorial exploration of Cameroon’s agricultural regions, which began in a banana plantation in Njombé-Penja, and now takes us to a cacao plantation a few kilometers from Yaoundé. Informed both by his predilection for the Old Masters of European painting and by his personal approach to composition, based on reenactment and photography, Marc Padeu composes a series of works which sublimes the quotidian. While bringing to the fore those usually left in the shadows of a globalized product consumed around the world, Padeu’s paintings do not depict work scenes. Instead, the artist shares moments of rest and get-together. While the setting has changed, the scenes he depicts show couples and groups in conversation, that are reminiscent of his earlier works. In Padeu’s hands the plantation becomes a metaphor for life: sowing, cultivating, tending, harvesting; and starting over. Season after season, the work in the plantation mirrors the cycles of life. From one painting to another Padeu’s oeuvre reveals itself as an investigation into the passing of life, the artist collecting and archiving precious moments of existence like cacao leaves in a herbarium. Info: Peres Projects, Piazza Belgioioso, 2, Milan, Italy, Duration: 9/3-6/4/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com/

Raha Raissnia and James Siena, share a common passion for the labyrinthine and the crypto-poetic. Both explore the behavior of abstract patterns, seeking to bring them to life. It was only a question of time, that their works would materialize themselves simultaneously and side by side, invading the two floors of Xippas gallery space. James Siena’s artworks on paper, explore the notion of algorithm, pushing it to its limits. Figurative works will also be included, introducing a dialogue with his linear abstraction. His curvy shapes will interlace, forming a “mind-boggling musculature”, to quote an American poet Geoffrey Young and James’s longtime collaborator whose beautiful text will accompany the exhibition. The edgy lines will build numerous puzzles and mazes; sometimes those will bristle like animals, clenching their half-abstract jaws. Raha Raissnia’s drawings are echoing the drawings by James Siena, they too will unveil complex mazy structures – a façade here, a ‘spaceship’ there – bringing an architectural touch into abstraction. The biomorphic and the technological will interweave. Reading the future from the lips of the past, Raha Raissnia’s artworks will play with time, creating images that appear both ancient and futuristic, as if they have been excavated by future generations from the multiple layers of soil and dust. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 Rue Vieille-du-Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 11/3-22/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.xippas.com/

Jean-Michel Alberola’s solo exhibition “1965 – 1966 – 1967 (détails)”, is focused on the three years he considers pivotal: 1965, 1966 and 1967. Conceived as an installation, the exhibition combines painted walls, canvases, silkscreens and works on paper, offering a fascinating journey through the influences, passions and commitments of the unclassifiable artist. Born in Saida in 1953, Jean-Michel Alberola spent the early 1960s in Algeria, in the midst of the war of independence. This traumatic experience, which led to his exile, caused the young Alberola to develop an obsessive focus on world news, politics, music and film. A focus that has left an enduring mark on his work. “I don’t believe in inspiration,” he explains, “but rather in a way of reading the surface of the world, of being clearly aware of it and being able to do something with it.” From the 1965 Watts riots to the release of Thelonious Monk’s jazz album “Straight No Chaser”, and excerpts from Jean-Luc Godard’s scripts, Alberola depicts a poetic movement centring on a period he considers fundamental to understanding recent contemporary history. “Most of the time, I wait for political realities to form questions and become images to be fashioned,” he explains, “all it needs is one thing to come to my mind for me to find myself with a lot of work.” As always, the artist’s aim is to “tell stories”, his story, to recount the world as he sees and imagines it, but also to shed indirect light on the power of art and its ability to transform the present. Info: Galerie Templon, Veydtstraat 13A, Brussels – Belgium, Duration: 11/3-27/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.templon.com/new/

The project “Metamorfosi. Percorsi oltre la forma”, brings together the works of fuse*, Yojiro Imasaka, Silvia Infranco, Giulio Malinverni. The term metamorphosis literally means everything that goes beyond its own form. This concept takes on different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. It is certainly more specific when applied in the scientific field, where it concerns precise changes in organic structures due to the evolutionary processes that determine them.  Yojiro Imasaka tries to capture the image of a nature still preserved from the violent transformations induced by human technique, fuse* use the latter as a tool of analysis and aesthetic expression of the continuous transformations of reality. The problem of technique in relation to metamorphosis is also at the centre of Giulio Malinverni’s research. Reflecting on the relationship between light and matter in painting, he shows the dreamlike dimension of the process of becoming, a type of transformation that turns from the reality of the senses to the infinite possibilities of the imagination. In Silvia Infranco’s works, the use of wax “transcends time” or “suspends and preserves” a surface from its own experience. Info: Marignana Arte, Dorsoduro, 141 Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, Venice, Italy, Duration: 11/3-6/5/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.marignanaarte.it/

Gabriel Kuri presents his first solo exhibition in China with nearly 30 works made between 1999-2023, including 3 major commissions produced by the Aranya Art Center, as well as a series of new works conceived for this occasion. A sculptor at heart, Gabriel Kuri is celebrated for his dexterity, precision, and wit in convincingly forging unexpected unions between diverse materials. From found objects to collected or repurposed items, Kuri consistently directs our attention to the easily neglected detritus of the everyday. Cigarette butts, receipts, doorstops, and metal sheets become emblems of capitalist and consumer society. For the artist, there are no strictly “natural” materials. Every object is imbued with information and signification. Kuri extracts from these items coded meanings and hidden values, such as risk, luck, speculation, and emergency, filtered through the lens of commerce and modern economics. Materials are converted into forms, reminiscent of and renewing our understandings of art historical movements like Minimalism, Arte Povera, and New Generation Sculpture. Kuri’s artistic strategy employs a system of rational structures and categorization, inspired from such industrial organizational schemes as the directory board, Take-a-Number tickets, punch cards, as well as corporate charts and graphics. Info: Aranya Art Center, Aranya Gold Coast Community, Beidaihe New District , Qinhuangdaom, China, Duration: 12/3-25/6/2023, www.aranyaartcenter.com/

“Hidden” is one of the largest museum retrospectives to date devoted to the work of Rita Ackermann and traces the last three decades of her career in a selection of around fifty paintings and drawings created in New York from the 1990s onwards. The exhibition presents a number of works dating to shortly after her arrival in the city—works in which the female figures are clearly visible—in dialogue with more recent pieces from the “Mama” series she began working on in 2018, whose figures are concealed under lines and layers of color. It also includes a selection of paintings created for the occasion, on the topic of war. The layout of the MASI exhibition shows how the artist, after starting out with a figurative aesthetic that was immediately accessible to viewers, later came to rethink the figures that inhabit her works, going so far as to cover them with layers of paint. While the early works are small or medium-sized and mainly on paper, the more recent series, on large format canvases, present a bold, expressive gesturality. This transition, this process, is emblematic of a category-defying path that has enabled the artist to remain unseen and free; “hidden”, as per the title of the exhibition. Info: The Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI Lugano), Piazza Bernardino Luini 6, Lugano, Switzerland, Duration: 12/3-13/8/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed, Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.masilugano.ch/

In “Sono Etrusco”, an exhibition by Lorenzo Brinati the works stem from a rich understanding of the materials he uses and the traditions connected to these. This series, named for the ancient Etruscan civilization originally formed in the Tuscan countryside the artist inhabits, alludes to an ancient system of knowledge finding connection between the elements, celestial bodies and human life and memory through the energies and frequencies all of these aspects emit. This connection to the deeprooted history of the environment he works in is felt in all Lorenzo Brinati’s artworks, through their exploration of texture, terrain and color, but also in the titles referencing ancient mythologies and characters. As a sculptor, his style derives from an attention to nature and the harmony and rhythm in the architecture of his home while simultaneously looking east, drawing inspiration from his travels as a sailor in Greece and Turkey. Info: Cadogan Gallery, 87 Old Brompton Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 15/3-21/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, https://cadogangallery.com/

Gideon Appah in “How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights”, his first solo exhibition in the UK presents a suite of new, highly ambitious paintings that speak to ideas of identity, memory, and imagination. At the core of Appah’s artistic practice is a fascination with the intangible. His dreamlike, enigmatic paintings convey emotions that exist beyond the confines of language. For Appah, painting is an intuitive act of translation of the inner self to the exterior world. His singular visual lexicon interlaces fragments from reality and imagination to construct mystical, painterly scenes that resist narrative and classification. A surrealist streak runs through several paintings, further subverting expectations and undermining straightforward readings. For example, in “Seated Man” (2021-22) a figure looks out to sea while a collection of incongruous objects including oranges and a disembodied hand holding a lit cigarette gathers beside them. Central to Appah’s practice is the rich period of Ghanaian history following the country’s independence in 1957. Appah draws on a diverse array of visual sources – including childhood memories and family photographs as well as old newspaper clippings, music videos, cinema, and early ethnographic images – to create his idiosyncratic paintings that feel at once deeply personal and coolly anonymous. Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 15/3-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Bang Geul Han in his solo exhibition “Land of Tenderness” presents the first part of “Terre de Tendre”, a new virtual reality work and accompanying immersive video installation. The work is loosely based on the Carte du Tendre: a map created by a group of women in 17th century France that charts the path towards true love through an imagined land.  The simulated landscape is embedded with text generated by an artificial intelligence system trained on legislation and court rulings concerning immigration and borders, as well as firsthand accounts of migrant children’s journeys and experiences. The work uses virtual reality technologies to interrogate themes of interdependency, memory, empathy, and care among human and non-human agents, in order to approach and reframe questions concerning the ongoing migration crisis. The exhibition also features recent works across a variety of media, with an emphasis on legislative changes including the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion, and the difficult decisions it leaves for the most vulnerable among us in its wake. Info: Curator: Anjuli Nanda Diamond and George Bolster, The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/3-13/5/2023, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.the8thfloor.org/