CHASON MATTHAMS – ADVANCES, NONE MIRACULOUS

Matthams constructs non-linear narratives by appropriating and making references to numerous art historical and pop culture imagery, mostly found online, where there is no hierarchy between styles, ways of rendering, time periods, or whether the authors are classified as artist, illustrator, designer, or otherwise.

One way to look at this series of paintings, Matthams says about his work, is as a mind going into anxious overdrive trying to construct a narrative out of all the disparate information and random juxtapositions one is confronted with daily. I can’t help but think of the fractured progression of my paintings as the way I experience life itself, open and almost chaotic in the moment but falling into a narrative over time.

Pragmatism is at the basis of the work, Matthams continues, I honestly don’t know if I am considering this right now because David Milch is an admirer of the American philosopher and psychologist William James or because this summer Pixar’s “Inside Out” affected me more than anything else. The movie illustrated the abstract thought section of the brain as a potentially hazardous zone, a place where the characters lose sight of who they are and how they function in day-to-day life. They start interacting with each other and the world not through emotional truths but through ideas and concepts that then become so abstracted it’s impossible for them to function in reality.

Opposite – Large warm playback, 2015

Exhibition runs through to September 13th, 2015

Thierry Goldberg Gallery
103 Norfolk Street
New York
NY
10002

www.thierrygoldberg.com

MAUREEN GALLACE

Quietly refining her practice over 20 years at the limits of painterly representation, Gallace’s recent works find her training her eye on the sea, translating the simultaneously calm and unnerving duality inhabiting the edges of the earth. Within these intimate vistas are a multitude of moments, a nearly filmic rendering of the ocean’s persistent pull. Evoked by means of a deliberate yet improvisational hand, Gallace’s graceful marks make it feel as though time spent looking at the ocean has been stretched spontaneously, waves frozen into a hesitance that can exist only in memory or its evocation. In July 4th, the seascape materializes as broad color fields, with details punctuating the scene in capricious ellipses. The ocean trails off, it continues inside and outside the picture plane, allowing but one glimpse of the sublime and continuous neverending.

Gallace’s subjects are not always so ephemeral. The brushwork in Storm is more blunt, the depiction more vivid and physical. Thirsty shrubs dot the foreground, terrestrial tethers in sublunary greens and yellows. A misty light suffuses the scene, one of tranquility before the charge of nature. A deep reverence for the sea exists alongside a casual sense of fraternity and awe. Pushing paint onto her panels in pointedly autonomous strokes, a kind of tapestry emerges, a way of recording an evanescent coexistence with our own surroundings. Gallace’s stark and simple titles exude a manner of acceptance and composure in the face of nature’s grandiloquence, and point to a conceptualist’s fascination with subtleties in the infinitely repeatable. Neither ocean nor painting can ever be the same twice.

Opposite – Storm, 2014

Exhibition runs from September 17th to October 31st, 2015

303 Gallery
547 W 21st Street
New York
NY
10011

www.303gallery.com

TIMO NASSERI – NINE FIRMAMENTS

In Timo Nasseri’s current exhibition “Nine Firmaments” he concerns himself with the topic of notation and readability. He examines the difficulties of transcription and the loss of knowledge through notation and its transferal back into the three-dimensional space.

Nasseri’s drawing “Nine Firmaments”, which lends the show its title, as well as “Orbis Tertius” make use of illustrative elements that appear familiar to the observer. Graphic, geometric symbols, digits and letters from the fields of mathematics, cartography and astronomy are placed in a complex, yet purely intuitive, indecipherable correlation. The words, numbers and forms bear associative significance for the observer, seem to be references, but no clear sense can be made of them, despite the fact that these notations originally serve to designate and preserve information and knowledge and make them accessible. Nasseri questions the vocabulary of characters that visually has become so commonplace to us by creating his own fantastical worlds of characters, captivating in their minuteness and precision, but also puzzling to the observer.

Opposite – “Pion”, 2015

Exhibition runs through to October 31st, 2015

SCHLEICHER/LANGE
Markgrafenstraße 68
10969 Berlin
Germany

www.schleicherlange.com