calendario eventi  :: 

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1/6/2005

Two exhibitions

Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York

Saturday Morning

Lisha Bai
Adam Ogilvie
Liliana Porter
Morten Schelde
Mathias Schmied
Fidel Sclavo
Sophie Toulouse

Josee Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present a Saturday morning with a record duration of 38 days. In an intense world it would relieve if, for a while, Saturday mornings would extend to the rest of the week.

Adam Ogilvie presents a life size bear made of cardboard and dry wall screws. The Trojan beast, peacefully asleep on the floor is the sentinel to the surrounding outburst of images. Paris based artist Sophie Toulouse creates a colorful wallpaper installation, a dreamy landscape based on her ongoing project The Nation of Angela, a utopian island where communal ideals coexist with fashion, glamour and luxury. Lisha Bai examines the materiality and function of walls by constructing architectural images from joint compound in relief on drywall panels.

Liliana Porter’s Drawing Man is a sculpture that draws. It is a wall calligraphy in progress where a minuscule figure on a pedestal creates a gigantic graffiti on a gallery wall. Fidel Sclavo‘s videos and watercolors based on Vermeer pay tribute to the background in painting. They reveal the importance of the unperceived and deconstruct the obvious through a succession of close-ups and removals. Mathias Schmied manipulates comic strips and magazine images. In his ongoing series Venetian Blinds, he transfers images from pornographic magazines onto pristine sheets of paper. The result is a soft, ghostly and almost abstract image. Danish artist Morten Shelde’s colored pencil works are a strange mixture of consciousness and automatic drawing. The single-family houses with Warhol-posters and classical Danish furniture are transformed into mysterious scenery, where something uncanny infiltrates the everyday comfort zone.

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Cabinet of drawings

Ricardo Lanzarini’s ink drawings are composed of crowds of tiny figures: frantic little men dressed in extravagant attire swarm around the white page like a colony of industrious insects. This eccentric cast of characters portrays the frustration of the human condition with a great deal of humor and delicacy. There are no heroes in Lanzarini’s drawings, no saints, no geniuses: just crowds of insignificant people. The minuscule characters seem to have lost every hope without ever loosing patience, wit, and elegance. The figures wear a variety of costumes and hats—Arabian robes, circus outfits, exotic fezzes; silly berets and military helmets; fluffy turbans, tiny minarets, upside-down trumpets, and minuscule towers. Like characters out of a Kafka novel or a Beckett play, they wait patiently for nothing to happen, resigned to their anonymous condition. These opaque multitudes are prepared to throw away all their time standing on endless lines, waiting to resolve some inextricable bureaucratic matter. They figure a collective, forgettable, and minor nightmare. The artist himself seems resolved to lose all his time, drawing with extreme detail what is usually left to statistic studies.

Ricardo Lanzarini was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1963. In 2001, he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim foundation. His work was included in the VII Havana Biennial, Cuba in 2000 and in Talespinning, at The Drawing Center in New York in 2004. He will also be part of Vitamin D, the upcoming survey on contemporary drawing published by Phaidon Press.

Opening: Thursday, June 2, 6 to 8pm

Image: Ricardo Lanzarini

Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street - New York

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