"Voices and Visions” weaves everyday experiences of interiority and exteriority into unfamiliar patterns. The exhibition alludes to the staggered flows of modern life, the dailiness of life on a grid, but stops just short of regimented reality. The shapeliness of articles of clothing becomes suffused with covert narratives; a sink softly fissures into a transgressive object; and the monolithic surfaces of buildings are earmarked by a sense of melancholic possibility.
Yongjae Kim’s paintings project an aura of unknowableness, of epistemological uncertainty. Their hyper-accurate attack displays both stunning technical command and a playful sense of multiple realities in collision. His ethereal beauty of paintings conceals a tough-minded skepticism of radical empiricist bent — as with all photorealistic painting, the basic acts of perception and vision are called into question by the aggressive blurring of medium.
Jon MacGregor’s lushly sculptured oil paintings handled with Renaissance-level skill portray such ordinary objects as shirts, door latches, washbasins, and curtains; two of them center painstakingly depicted broken eggs. The framing of the subjects is often disjointed or askew; when combined with the precise, glowing facture, the result is mysterious and mesmerizing.
At 8 feet tall, Jean-Guerly Petion’s latest sculpture, “Echoes of the Primordial" anchored by a cement base from which a central pole ascends, meticulously wrapped in wire to form a grandiose flower, its petals delicately crafted from papier-mâché, a large toy snake, once beloved by the artist's son, gracefully coiling around the pole -- symbolizing the intertwining of growth, memory, the passage of time. The choice of materials and symbols speak to the essence of those wistful moments that live on, binding themes of nostalgia, connection, and eternal unfolding.
What makes Lily Prince’s work significant is not only her choice of colors, but the way in which she abstracts from illusionistic space, preserving only the essential character of a landscape. Those two perspectival restrictions—figure and ground—which representational artists cling to, are lucidly eschewed in Prince's work. This doesn’t make her work any less observational; rather, it enriches the tradition of en plein air painting to include unfamiliar elements.
Using ruined architectures as a backdrop, Alberto Alejandro Rodríguez constructs liminal spaces suggestive of abandoned spaces, entrances leading nowhere. In an effort to articulate how the vestiges of human effort that earmark such spaces can align with polarizing feelings of rootlessness and nostalgia, Rodríguez underscores the political narratives that are encrusted onto the surfaces of these sites. These narratives are written in a cipher of wood and iron, swaths of torn-up wallpaper. But it’s only through the process of destruction, as it gradually reveals foundations which would normally be kept hidden, that the true cornerstones of our society can come to light.
For further information please contact 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by e-mail at info@532gallery.com