Camouflages
dal 13/3/2003 al 30/4/2003
Segnalato da
13/3/2003
Camouflages
Martinez Gallery, New York
The premier New York show of Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes. 'Camouflages' has one central point of departure and reflection: the human skin. Paredes, like symbolist French poet Paul Valery before her, sees the skin, thin and delicate though it may be, as indeed the most profound and telling aspect of our being. In the skin, Paredes finds her own Dorian Gray, some post-industrial Narcissus gazing in upon his own reflection.
CECILIA PAREDES
BROOKLYN - Martinez Gallery is pleased to present 'Camouflages,' the premier New York show of Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes, running through April. Paredes, who for the past dozen years has lived and worked in San José, Costa Rica, brings her unique vision of nature and the human condition to Martinez Gallery, essaying a critique of these all-too uniform times with photographic works. Her work, as seen here, is a deep look into the human surface, literally, and its deliberate confusion with nature itself.
'Camouflages' has one central point of departure and reflection: the human skin. Paredes, like symbolist French poet Paul Valery before her, sees the skin, thin and delicate though it may be, as indeed the most profound and telling aspect of our being. In the skin, Paredes finds her own Dorian Gray, some post-industrial Narcissus gazing in upon his own reflection. In our naked skin, Paredes argues, is found the very means to hide and disguise ourselves, a seeming paradox that has become the quotidian norm in these times of simulation, presumption, camouflage, transvestitism and uniformity, where nothing is what it claims to be and nothing is used for what it appears to be made.
Paredes' work questions, like Kafka's 'Metamorphosis,' the ritual paralysis and the threats to identity engendered by the constant changes of x{2018}skin' that fall upon us every new season, as if it were a new set of clothing, a passing trend, obses-sively temporary and disposable, beyond any lasting fixation. Of course, the skin can also mask hypocrisy, obfuscation, lying, escape, carnival, the bad faith of reality, desire and even the makeup we wear when we go hunting into the night...
Cecilia Paredes puts the viewer into the skin of the natural world, in the skins of endangered animals and plants (as is all of life and existence, too, endangered), revealing the voracious beast that is man, that pathetically pushes towards its own oblivion. Her work develops previous projects, employing accumulation and archival and baroque fragmentation of what amount to evidence of memory, putting into flesh a kind of literal catalogue of the continual loss of our habitat and our natural selves, our wild selves, full or ritual and symbol. It's a spirit that originates by marrying itself to fertility and the soil, the love of the light that makes all things grow, the goddess nature.
FROM MAR 14 THRU APRIL
opening: mar 14 2002, 8 PM
after party: 10 PM -
For more information or press queries, please call 718.706.0606
Gallery Hours: 1 PM - 7 PM Thursday - Sunday.
Martinez Gallery
37 Greenpoint Avenue
New York