Booth: 1111
For SPRING/BREAK New York 2022, 532 Gallery presents five artists whose work celebrates, explores, and explodes the idea of artistic rebirth through the theme of Naked Lunch: Renaissance Revels and Rites. A visual carnival of themes and ideas, the exhibit presents a contemporary cornucopia of aesthetic plenty. Naked Lunch asks, “what can be preserved, reasserted, rediscovered from Greek philosophy, ancient teachings, myth?”
John Alexander Parks’s Putti paintings answer the question with sardonic re-workings of, and commentaries upon, high Renaissance themes of the angelic and the earthly, using beautifully rendered cherubs to substitute for the traditional classical figures of the constellations filling the night sky, or with combinations of putti interacting in sprawling vistas of exultation and damnation — in other words, “troubles in paradise both celebratory and enraged,” as the prospectus has it.
Elio Rodríguez’s "Jungla Desnuda" pieces, including "Black Jungle", toy with the ideas of the skin, growth, color, foliage — all central preoccupations of the neo-Renaissance imagination.
Jean-Guerly Pétion’s “Echo and Narcissus” manifests Ovid's mythological narrative with highly distinctive graphical sensibility, using techniques from painting, mixed media and assemblage. His painting “Quick Reclining Gesture” presents a Black version of the odalisque nudes so beloved of classical sculpture — a “Neo-Renaissance return to Nature, the Body, figuration, and metaphors of nudity … often al fresco.”
The German painter Heidrun Rathgeb’s connection to the Renaissance is perhaps the most straightforward of all, as her hallucinatory nightscapes are executed using egg tempera, a medium dating to ancient Egypt, whose precise, jewel-like colors were beloved of late medieval painters and beyond. And the classical idea of the antiquarian sculpture — its limnification of the sensuous in cold marble — finds an unnervingly contemporary echo in the sculptures of Paco Marcial, which do indeed serve as a version of “the archaic torso of Apollo.”
John Alexander Parks’s Putti paintings answer the question with sardonic re-workings of, and commentaries upon, high Renaissance themes of the angelic and the earthly, using beautifully rendered cherubs to substitute for the traditional classical figures of the constellations filling the night sky, or with combinations of putti interacting in sprawling vistas of exultation and damnation — in other words, “troubles in paradise both celebratory and enraged,” as the prospectus has it.
Elio Rodríguez’s "Jungla Desnuda" pieces, including "Black Jungle", toy with the ideas of the skin, growth, color, foliage — all central preoccupations of the neo-Renaissance imagination.
Jean-Guerly Pétion’s “Echo and Narcissus” manifests Ovid's mythological narrative with highly distinctive graphical sensibility, using techniques from painting, mixed media and assemblage. His painting “Quick Reclining Gesture” presents a Black version of the odalisque nudes so beloved of classical sculpture — a “Neo-Renaissance return to Nature, the Body, figuration, and metaphors of nudity … often al fresco.”
