5 Jan 2012 to 11 Feb 2012
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6 p.m
Paul Kasmin Gallery
293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street
& 511 / 515 W. 27th Street
NY 10001
New York, NY
New York
North America
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Santi Moix on Huckleberry Finn: Watercolors and Wall Drawings January 5th - February 11th, 2012 Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY
Santi Moix on Huckleberry Finn: Watercolors and Wall Drawings January 5th - February 11th, 2012 Private view January 5th, 2012, 6 – 8pm 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY
Three years after tackling themes and images from the quintessential work of Spanish satirical-heroism, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Santi Moix animates the ultimate allegory of American cultural-heroism, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Moix's series of watercolors, collages, and wall-drawings transcribe the optimism, color, and vernacular panache of Twain's characters and prose. They also represent a witty confrontation between the artist and his adopted land; the works on exhibit are the quasi-autobiographical "Adventures" of Santi Moix.
Just as Twain described antebellum Mississippi while writing from his home on the Connecticut coast, Moix uses his outsider status to gain perspective on America’s traditions and cultural history. Twain had to return to the Mississippi many years after he began composing "Adventures" in order to be able to conclude it. Similarly, Santi engaged with this archetypically American work after returning to New York from a few years' hiatus in Barcelona.
Much as the Mississippi is Twain's La Mancha, the book's river is also a deeply-felt symbol for Moix's life and art—a flow of fissile and mutable identities, personal and national; an agent of tension between a fluvial nomadic life and the fixity of civilization. Through Huck and his “Adventures,” Santi Moix illustrates the insight central to all great artists and writers: that art is ever-young and never docile.
James Nares 1976: Films and Other Works, January 5th January 5th - February 11th, 2012 Private view January 5th, 2012, 6 – 8pm 515 West 27th Street, New York, NY
“Lower Manhattan in 1976 was a beautiful ruin. The crumbling wasteland proved fertile ground for artists though, nurturing the talent of a generation inspired by its vast emptiness.” James Nares
Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present 1976: Films and other works, a new exhibition by James Nares. Before he was painting large, single movement brush strokes, Nares’s kinetic investigations took other forms and directions. His preoccupation with movement and bodies in motion was well provided for in what amounted to an enormous, open air, common studio. The post-industrial landscape became the backdrop, subject and the medium during his prolific early career.
The exhibition will feature five films including his 1976 Pendulum, which clocks a large spherical mass as it swings on a wire, strung up high from the footbridge, since dismantled, crossing Staple Street in downtown Manhattan. The exhibition will also feature a series of black and white chronophotographs that reveal the temporal structure of a pendulum’s swing, invisible to the naked eye, along with drawings, diagrams, objects, photos and other related material.
Of Nares’s films, Amy Taubin writes, “Pendulum, like several other of Nares's mid-'70s films—Hand Notes #2 (1975) and Ramp, Steel Rod, and Poles (all 1976)—was influenced by the films Richard Serra made in the late '60s, primarily Hand Catching Lead (1968). Both films depict a single, repeated action involving the effect of gravity on a heavy metal object. But the comparison stops there. Pendulum has a haunted lyricism, which has nothing to do with Serra's interests. The film evokes an anxiety dream: The entropic movement of the groaning pendulum, the claustrophobic effect of the industrial buildings lining the site on three sides, the slivers of sunlight penetrating the dust-laden air, even the occasionally glimpsed shadow of the filmmaker, suggest that something terrible has taken or is about to take place on this desolate street.”
