29 Jan 2009 to 14 Mar 2009

Stefan Annerel's abstract art could actually just as well be called extremely figurative.

The motifs and the colours are fresh from reality. Or rather, from the trivial. From a plastic bag to a facecloth or a pillowcase bought in a cheap chain store. The woven pattern of the bag in which the Borgerhout (Antwerp) inhabitants-most of them immigrants-carry their laundry to the launderette. A football shirt or an indefinite piece of cloth, bought at the early market. An advertisement from a well-thumbed book or a catalogue of a do-it-yourself shop. The logo of the local night shop, designed by the owner. The cheerless sign of a suspect import/export business. Wrapping paper of an Asian supermarket.
The small marks and patterns of our time. Domestic, middle-class, second-hand, local, private. Yet as universal as the large visual footprints of globalization.

Annerel first made minute copies (i.e. painted or cut and pasted them) of these patterns, measuring 1 cm x 2 cm, which he applied on index cards. The traditional index card box was and is still a basic element for Annerel-as if it were a collection of topographic maps which together constitute his universe or his territory. His collection of Polaroids. His Atlas.
Composing the collection has taken some five or six years. All this time, this labourious drudgery seemed to serve no special aim. There was no programme, no track had been charted.

Yet there was an intermediate stage. In second-hand shops Annerel bought framed reproductions, on which he then copied his motifs and patterns. On a reproduction of Man Ray, he applied one of his own collages that had been touched up with acrylics. He called it Ray. A collage on a photograph by Hans Opdebeeck became Hans. Another collage, on a leaflet with a jeans add, became Blue Jeans.

And then some alchemy entered into the game. Instead of "immortalizing" his painted collages behind a sheet of glass, Annerel had the idea that he could just as well "solidify" them in a layer of resin. The idea was the start of a process of endless deconstruction and reconstruction, but above all, it was to become a process of magnification and a process that made created "shine".
Each of Annerel's works nowadays consists of a basis of wood and/or glass on which a first collage has been applied with strips of paper, pieces of cloth, plastic film, airbrush and acrylics. Over these, six or seven layers of resin have been applied, but between the layers the artist has continued to work with acrylics. In the evening, the artist pours hot, molten resin over the works he considers ready, which has more or less dried up in the morning, so that the works are ready for the artist to start applying paint again.
The first works that resulted from this process were relatively small (the frames from the second-hand shops), but as the artist got more control and his confidence grew, the size of the works increased. Now Annerel creates series measuring 110 cm x 140 cm, or even 125 cm x 175 cm. It would be impossible to make them larger in his workshop on the attic of his house in Borgerhout. Furthermore, with all those layers of resin and in their metal frames, the works are particularly heavy.
Banality and triviality have acquired lustre. A lustre that is hard as glass. Tangible and unmistakable, but also illusory and deceptive-that is how lustre is. Gloomy, vague images from free catalogues have been processed and turned into marvellous areas of colour that seem to come from expensive glossy magazines. The origin of the images has been hidden, their history has been wiped out and falsified.
Thus the visual simplicity, the bustle and chaos of the working-class districts will steal its way into the lofts of harbour and the villas of suburbia. Recycled, stylized, polished.

But that too, is an illusion. For if you look carefully-deep into the image-you will still see reality. There is a hair in the resin. Now there's a scrap of cloth, now there's a trace of rubbish. It's like a macroscopic image made with a telephoto lens.
Like in an apparently pitch-black surface by Rothko the yellow from five layers deeper still resonates.
Like an agitated, baroque interior by Matthias Weischer often consists of a disorientating multiplicity of soothing areas of colour.
We could just as well refer to Stefan Annerel's abstract art as extremely figurative art, because in this instance the difference between abstract and figurative seems an abstraction.

PS Stefan Annerel's work is also particularly suited to leave behind fingermarks. A shining history can easily become well-thumbed.

 

 

Kusseneers Gallery
De Burburestraat 11
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
+ 32 (0)3 257 24 00

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michaële-Andréa SCHATT
Paysages en ose

19 Dec 2008 - 28 Feb, 2009

 

For Michaële-Andréa Schatt, the practice of painting is a simple, direct and revealing tool. It is also a sort of a pit of silence and darkness, a space in which one can take another breath and go on breathing. Her painting emerges from the surface and at the same time tells a story from a story where shadow and obscurity, weave and go beyond representation. Michaële-Andréa Schatt paints the souvenir of landscapes by free associations, where the subject does not appear as a unity of place and an image, but like a combination or invention of disparate elements. She proceeds by a series of successive overlappings of memorial fragments. These "impressions" evoke the shadows of coats, landscapes, coat-landscapes, mental landscapes...

With these "Paysages en Ose", Michaële-Andréa Schatt conceals her tracks, and contaminates the landscape with an omnipresent pink. "Recently, I wanted to be more "daring" in painting, Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp's ritornellos "La Vie en Ose" came to mind: "We assume, we oppose, we impose, we affix, we lay down, we annoy..." Pink established itself like a challenge. In the practice of landscape, it appears beside the point, anti-natural and strikingly out of place. It gnaws and tears apart the homogeneity of a place. Space becomes proliferated, invasive, as if organic. The landscape organizes itself like a coat, an envelope or a negative body.

The exhibition introduces the artist's recent paintings of landscapes and kimonos. The kimono is at the same time a simple garment, but one, which does not reveal its full complexity at first sight. This garment, located between an intermediate space between a second and third dimension, folds and unfolds like an origami.

Michaële-Andréa Schatt develops a body of paintings where her technical procedures induce a reversal, inversions, gaps, the fragmentation of images. The totalities of her works, along with her ceramic pieces, weave the three axes of landscape, body and textile....

Her work can be found in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum and the Museum of Ceramics in Rouen, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain, FRAC Ile de France, FRAC Franche Comté, Banque Nationale de Paris (France - USA), Musée de Céret - France, Le Bon Marché as well as in private collections throughout Europe and the USA.

 

 

 

Galerie Isabelle Gounod
13 rue Chapon
75003 Paris
France

+33 (0)1 48 04 04 80

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan. 17th - Feb. 21st, 2009

 

Chung King Project is delighted to present "Time Will Tell", a series of new work by Marius Bercea. The young Romanian painter who currently lives and works in the city of his birth, Cluj-Napoca (capital city of the province of Transylvania), caught the European art world's imagination with his series of vivacious, Naples-yellow paintings whose subjects derive from what the artist describes as an 'intensely personal archive'. Like these earlier paintings, this current body of work owes its genesis to images sourced from family photographs, newspaper clippings and personal memories of growing up. Yet, unlike the earlier paintings that succeeded in evoking the happiness found in the kind of simple moments of childhood pleasure that transcend geographical and political boundaries and provoke nostalgia among adults everywhere: fondly remembered games, school trips and public holidays, Bercea's new works tend instead towards the engendering of unease and discomfort. We are presented with dreams that will never be realised, hopes that have failed to be fulfilled and scenes such as abandoned amusement parks once intended for children that have become the haunts of the disturbed, the lonely and the dispossessed.

Yet while Bercea's earlier works may have seemed to be all sunshine on initial reading, as the series evolved, they began to provoke some sinister questions of their own: Why was the sky always that peculiar shade of yellow - and why everything so brilliantly, acidly illuminated? The answer is far from innocent - Romania borders the Ukraine and many people in Romania believe the yellow cloud that accompanied the Chernobyl disaster impacted far more on the health of their youngsters than was 'officially' allowed to be communicated to them.

Bercea began his journey into the exploration of the familial archive by questioning the authenticity of the perfect sunlit childhood memory that the photograph boasts of and the painting (invested with a chromatic register inspired by a nuclear fall out) can claim to be a lie. In this new body of work he presents at Chung King, he refuses to give us an easy time - it's not possible to simply look fondly on the scenes he presents to us - but we can wonder at how Bercea succeeds in breathing pathos and beauty into the banality of the lives he draws for us, at how he elicits tenderness from us for his subjects; and at his brave decision (demonstrated with often determinedly sketchy brushwork), to refuse to prettify or polish his paintings - instead leaving them raw, edgy and somehow fittingly naive.

Marius Bercea was born in 1979 and has already widely shown in various places in Europe, including Plan B, Cluj, and Eleven Fine Art, London. This exhibition will be his first in the United States.

 

Marius Bercea
Black Seas Heights, 2008
Oil on canvas, 220 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Chung King Project, Los Angeles
 

Chung King Project
945 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
+1 323 933 4746

 

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