Copenhagen Graffiti
Tofer Chin
A highly-regarded explorer of visual communication, Aldous Huxley once said, “The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never quite be the same as the man who went out.” The same can be said about a few particular months of teenage life experienced by artist Tofer Chin, depicted, from memory, in his new body of work, showing at the Fecal Face Gallery in San Francisco.
Entitled “Alex,” Chin’s new show further represents his on-going relationship with Op-Art, as well as his perseveration on sensory perception and mind expansion, while also impressively marking his move to wholly personalize and reinvigorate the movement. Whereas previous works used unnatural color and concept to examine the spiritual and psychological impact of synthetic LSD, “Alex” strives to enhance the personal and shift to the organic by refocusing on the naturally-derived hallucinogen, mescaline. Unlike LSD, mescaline never lies. Instead, the mescaline experience includes visual enhancements of originating truths.
Identical to the intricate components frozen in each of Chin’s new works, these fleeting enhancements come in the form of recurring visual patterns such as stripes, checkerboards, angular spikes and other very simple fractals which can and ultimately do turn very complex. This, en total, surmises the intended shape of Chin’s current exploration.
“Alex,” Chin’s most personal showing to date, represents a finite period, a series of particular months, connected by a hard line of earth tones, deliberately involved, only to be exhilerated through the mescaline eyes upon which they reflect. Catch a glimpse from the confines of your controlled mind as trip excerpts pause on the gallery walls. Bare witness, assuredly safe, as Chin completed the actual experience evoked, long, long ago.
Chin’s showing at the Fecal Face Gallery also marks the release of his new limited-edition acid print. Entitled “No. 1.2.” This signed and numbered print will be available through the gallery.
About Tofer Chin
Tofer Chin, a Los Angeles native, continues to exhibit, in both gallery and museum, in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, Sao Paulo and Australia. Past works appear in The Los Angeles Times, Flaunt, Nylon, Theme, Trace, Big, Vice and Rojo. In 2006, Rojo published his first book of photography, entitled ‘Finger Bang’, and in 2008, published his highly anticipated follow-up, entitled ‘Vacation Standards’. In 2009, Chin participated in ROJO – OUT Urban Stage Sao Paulo where he was selected to create a permanent site specific painting on three massive concrete structures in the center of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Dan Graham | Taka Ishii Gallery Tokyo
BILL JENSEN
Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Bill Jensen. The show is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with an essay by David Hinton, a prominent scholar and respected translator of Chinese poetry. This is Jensen’s second show with the gallery; his first was in 2007.
Bill Jensen was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1945 and received his MFA at the University of Minnesota in 1970. He has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s, maintaining a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Jensen has long been respected for his unconventional abstractions, their compositions evocative of otherworldly landscapes where spatial definition is informed by structural logic. Shape, line, and intense color follow unpredictable paths, but coexist in psychic harmony. Influence of the early American modernists (Albert Pinkham Ryder, Arthur Dove) and the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, the prophetic Arshile Gorky) are evident, as are the visionary canvases of Myron Stout, and Forrest Bess.
Jensen is also inspired by Taoist philosophy, Chinese painting, and ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry. The third and fourth century Taoists believed that pure nature could not be experienced by humans, due to their inevitable mannerization of the natural world. Chinese painters subsequently attempted to depict the phenomena of nature “itself.” This history, linked to the idea that all matter is the same-the understanding that something is everything and everything is something-was of profound influence on Jensen. An intuitive, unpretentious painter, Jensen strives to attain content originating in the psychic and emotional; for him, content is more important than result. Jensen argues that his paintings’ beauty, or lack thereof, is not his decision, but determined by the painting itself.
Devoted to his craft, Jensen makes his own paints with finely ground pigments and a self-developed oil-based medium. This allows him to control viscosity and saturation, and provides a wide spectrum of color and texture in his paintings. His methodology consists of multiple layering, scraping, seeping and “dredging,” and is determined in part by unusual, self-made tools. Jensen’s experimental painting techniques are pivotal to the outcome of his heavily worked canvases. As he has stated, “Solutions come from the working process.”
The recent paintings on view in this exhibition show the range of Jensen’s process and the depth of his content, from ethereal, washy forms, to dense, physically worked surfaces of color and texture, punctuated by titles like Genesis, Time After Time and Occurrence Appearing of Itself. Saturated red, blues and yellows coalesce, extending in and out of space, retreating and aggressively reappearing. The drawings and works on paper, some black and white, are more intimate in scale, but still contain the translucency and intensity of the paintings. The black and white works, with their variety of tones, read as if they were in color, while the color drawings radiate hypnotic clarity. Drawing has been a constant throughout Jensen’s practice, and was at times his main mode of artistic exploration. Its direct relationship to his painting is evident.
The sense of freedom in Jensen’s work is belied by the commitment, consistency and seriousness with which he approaches it. As he says, “Each work for me is not about one idea; it is about an emotional event that must be searched for and clarified.” Jensen achieves his goal of transforming the viewer’s experience, providing a peek into the transcendent.
Rezi van Lankveld
Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Amsterdam-based artist Rezi van Lankveld. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition in New York.
Rezi van Lankveld continues her method of abstract painting that allows for revelation of the spontaneous image. In her newest works, van Lankveld concentrates on the lines that emerge from her paint-soaked canvasses. Out of these, she tames unforeseen images of figures and landscapes. In-between the swirls of the densely contrasting colors, impressionist-like figures with scenes reminiscent of 19th century lithographs and 20th century pen and ink cartoons emulsify out of what is essentially an abstract field.
Rezi van Lankveld’s practice closely mimics that of the abstract expressionists or that of the Surrealist ‘ecrire automatic’. Unlike her predecessors, her process must reveal a conscious image. Risk then plays a decisive act. It is the risk in this limited process that the painting will not lead to the right image or any image at all for that matter. Therefore concentration and precision become the major factors in the moving and setting of the paint. It is this oscillation between abstraction and figuration that completes van Lankveld’s process: her works are at once the image and every mark that has gone into making the paintings.
Rezi van Lankveld graduated from Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht in 1999. She lives and works in Amsterdam. She has shown extensively throughout Europe. Her recent exhibitions include: Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Museum voor actuele kunst, The Hague; Museum Kunst Palast, Duesseldorf; Diana Stigter Galerie, Amsterdam; ‘Interested Painting,” Gallery 400, University of Chicago, the ‘Prague Biennale 1’; and The Approach, London.
NICOLAS CECCALDI//FASHIONS IN THE MIDDLE-AGES
Banks Violette
Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Team Gallery, is pleased to announce a new installation by Banks Violette. Violette’s work ranges from haunting yet exquisitely rendered graphite drawings to sculptural installations composed of cast salt, light, and sound. Throughout his practice, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning through the process of mythology, often embodied in forms strongly associated with sub-cultural communities, personal memorials, or historical obscurities. The black and white spectacle of his stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion.
For this new installation, Violette continues to mine a rich art historical terrain in which the materials and forms associated with Minimal and Conceptual Art become reactivated as theatrical platforms of performative decay. He pairs a large chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes with a black wall that seems to buckle and melt against the reflection of the light. Both aspects of the installation recall the monochromatic tone and the use of replaceable industrial materials common to Minimalist and Conceptual sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; however, Violette’s works seem self-consciously constructed and theatrical. Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these more banal technical necessities, Violette heightens the artificial spectacle of his installation, as if willing these two canonical art historical movements into an internecine danse macabre. He unmasks form and content as sites vulnerable to intellectual vandalism and moribund mythologizing.
Banks Violette was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium; Kunsthalle Wein; the Modern of Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Royal Academy, London; P.S. 1, New York; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; among others.
DAWN FRASCH
HAAS & FISCHER is pleased to present the international premier solo show of American artist Dawn
Frasch (*1978, lives and works New York).
With the 18 paintings that are displayed in Zurich, Frasch invites the beholder into her cabinet of
sexual horror. Her works reflect the excessive confrontation with sexuality in contemporary society
that has become inevitable due to its constant presence in the Internet and media. This is true to
such an extent, that is has become a part of the everyday routine just like the daily mouse click. It is
not just the cadence of images that we are exposed to, but also the form of representation in
pornography, which have moved towards detailed, exaggerated close-ups. In this iconography of
sexual horror the boundaries between sexuality and violence seem to be diminishing.
With the painterly qualities of her work, Frasch punctuates the clash of the visual media. Some parts
of her paintings are structured by generous brush strokes while with others its seems like the focus
has been sharpened, and out of the cloudy constructs emerge delicately worked scenes with actors
that belong to a child’s book rather than to a pornographic magazine. She lets Sesame Street meet
the multimillion porn Industry.
In the work Dog Eat Dog Frasch depicts a pack of dogs that attack each other. The wild dogs that
are associated with wolfs can be read as the epitome of vice and in that way once again fit the
theme of sexual horror. The frontier between violent appropriation and lust seems to have vanished.
Influenced by feminist video and performance artists like Joan Jonas or Vivienne Dick, the artist
herself is familiar with those media. Their procedures are mirrored in her paintings, where some of
them appear to be like film stills where densely filled clusters have to balance with vague and fuzzy
areas.
Josh Azzarella
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present new photographs by JOSH AZZARELLA. AZZARELLA manipulates images from cinema, journalism and amateur photography. His photographs muddy the waters between the artificial beauty of a cinematic set and the inherent beauty of the natural landscape. Absent their most significant events, AZZARELLA’s images raise questions about how our society constructs a narrative of our collective history.
The emptying of the photographs presents each scene in its formal beauty but leaves a ghost of its narrative past. The viewer is tempted to draw relational lines between individual photographs and to decipher patterns and groupings, taking cues from color and film grain. Movie stills, homemade images and documentary footage mix together, as in our collective memory. How individual and collective memories form, the possibilities of confusing memories with realities or creating memories where none previously existed are all key to his oeuvre.
In one photograph vines drape across branches, hearkening documentary photographs of the Vietnam War although its true source is the B movie classic Creature from the Black Lagoon. Emptied seascapes recall the stillness of Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs. The backs of two men on an Elvis Presley film set evoke 1960s family photographs, perhaps of a picnic.
AZZARELLA lives and works in New York City. Solo and group exhibitions include Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica, CA); Vancouver Art Gallery (British Columbia); Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago); Akademie der Künste (Berlin). He was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and a solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is his third solo exhibition with DCKT Contemporary.