The next exhibition at Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris, curated by Emilie Bannwarth and Chris Sharp, will present the work of four young artists exploring the language of time's passing, through a rather concrete, palpable vestige of the twentieth century's modernist project - the multiple convolutions of architecture, and the erosion of its potential and contributions. The show focuses on the artists' individually developed visual representations of the ideological, and literal, ruins of what was once considered to be progress, grouped together for their shared appropriation of the romanticism of the subject and pictorial subversion, hot and bubbling and about to explode within the figurative image of the title.
Donovan Barrow, 'Villa Savoye'.
New York-based Donovan Barrow's paintings suggest what the apple would be without its core - he deconstructs icons of 20th century architecture such as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye by painting baroquely-lit disfigured maquettes in bright enamel spray paint. His paintings ooze with a desire for lyrical abstraction in the face of a hierarchically structure of perfection, like a call to re-interpret, via a little symbolic vandalism, the past's accepted notion of greatness.
Gil Heitor Cortesao.
Gil Heitor Cortesao's meticulously cool, melancholy interiors, painted on the reverse side of plexiglass, show architecture as a reflection of absence - his covered pool is filled with water, conspicuously empty of people, yet still lit. The Portuguese artist's mysteriously narrative compositions are full of a cinematic beauty, at times colour saturated and at times drained and sapped of life, aged like old film stock.
Dave McBride, 'None of it was wonderful'.
Dave McBride, like Cortesao, bases his paintings on photographs, but an organic, distorting process generates an entirely different direction for his work. McBride turns photos into finely made stencils, which he then applies to wood and enhances with layer upon layer of paint. The result is a sort of positive-negative palimpsest, a very physical record of considering and reconsidering a symbolic skyline and the effects of its presence on our perception.
Knut Eckstein, 'Drop shop'.
Knut Eckstein, in the curators' opinion, provides the quixotic coda to the narrative behind the exhibition. I love his sculptures, child-like constructions made from industrial refuse such as cardboard, fluorescent lights and enamel paint and which are playfully, in the most seemingly neutral of ways, reminiscent of architecture. As light, easy and anonymous looking as flat-pack furniture, but if you stare at them from the corner of your eye, the eerie familiarity of the century's disposable obsolescence will no doubt rise like a mirage.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
'A POSTCARD FROM THE VOLCANO', CURATED BY EMILIE BANNWARTH AND CHRIS SHARP
21 April - 26 May 2007
Suzanne Tarasieve
171 Rue du Chevaleret
75013 Paris
T: +33 145 860202
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