• Joann Kim - Review | Bio

The Bug, The Spider and The Butterfly
by Joann Kim

Painting embraces a multitudinous identity, allowing its history, process and value to be scrutinized and manipulated. It cannot be categorized, historicized or defined without neglecting an inherently elusive alternative.

Three artists in this exhibition explore this medium with both scrupulous and uninhibited intentions, accumulating and subtracting layers of it’s material and history, it’s conceptual and philosophical ruminations. Here, the distance between a painting and its maker is measured with varying perspective; calling upon Painting as an omnipotent, albeit vulnerable and impressionable, force to be reckoned with. While one artist builds a painting with layers of cultural and personal flair, another discovers a merging of self and nature within a canvas. The finished work is both a rhetoric and representation of itself, both commentary and living reflection of Painting and its surrounding audience.

Xavier Noiret-Thome utilizes an unhindered vocabulary to build paintings that are as much about Painting as they are about the world at large. This practice of metapainting opens more doors than can be entered at once, addressing the viewer with a cascade of references on a single painting: Ranging from his personal life, art history, pop culture, animation, and abstract geometric forms, each shape and layer are coalesced in fragmented and playful harmony.

The artist’s use of the chrome encrusted spider web is a proper example of his interest in graying definitives and taunting double entendres. The artist’s near refusal to be marked down to single styles and references is reflected in an infatuation with a color that is the reflection of all colors. This symbolic approach combined with a web that is the perfect geometric and organic structure allows the artist to indulge in a meta-formulaic practice that renders singularity as null.

Noiret-Thome sites artists such as Richter, Pollock, Crumb, Matisse, Mondrian and their subsequent movements in his paintings, some all within a single canvas, building a story that reflect one artist’s preoccupation with encompassing the whole of Painting at the risk of spreading himself too thin. The painting and drawings in this exhibition exemplify an artist on a never-ending and inconclusive mission to explore the narratives of painting, to pervert its certainties and drown in its a perpetual state of becoming.

The paintings of Janaina Tschape are created with an intuitive and organic process, where shapes and colors are extracted from nature. Uneven webs of earthly hues relate in a dance of vibrations, reflecting the passions and thoughts of an artist preoccupied with extending the personal to fables of fantasy and imagination. Ethereal, obsessive, geometric, and abstract, the works in the exhibition dismiss uniformity and formal precision, embracing a narrative rife with fairy tales and transformative imagination.

An alternate realty is created in a series of works where a constellation of shapes and colors are transcribed to photographs of figures in a wonderland of oversized plants. To enter and explore this world of abstracted landscapes means letting go of all inhibitions, escaping the rigid prescriptions of reality and embracing the unpredictable, fantastic, and unruly.

An undeniably feminine and sexual energy is visible in Tschape’s practice, finding empowerment in the freely flowing ambivalence of water and its manifold manifestations. Bountiful cascades of organic forms engage in relentless playfulness and embody the mind’s wish to lose control, to be free to enter an environment void of reason, becoming creatures of dreams and myths in a land of seductive and fertile disruption.

Gerben Mulder takes on a new approach for this exhibition, using painting and collage to depict the transience and beauty of nature. Where his earlier works focused on portraits of disturbing and nightmarish figures residing within isolated environments, the new series relay the same uneasiness and darkness that is more an underlying energy beneath the potential magnificence of living forms, one that is not promising or hopeful but strives to escape its deprecating circumstances.

A still life painting with flowers in a vase is executed with the blunt and uneven strokes, representing the leaves, the vase and its support in broad patterns, executed with the rich and dark palette of Fauvist influence. The fluidity in which the petals and stems are painted emphasizes a free flowing painterly approach, more concerned with the feel of the object than its pure representation. Formal vocabulary does not apply here, the reference to a traditional format is upturned and incorporated to a contemporary vocabulary that is as much about the voice of the artist as it is a statement of a deteriorating state of current establishments.

A series of collages are created with scraps of familiar imagery, taken apart and re-arranged to form trees and flowers. Lichtenstein’s Benday dots, vintage images of women, Mondrian’s compositional patterns, and botany illustrations are combined in this hodgepodge of art history and pop culture, manipulated and decomposed to shape and color a living object. It alludes to a dismissal of cultural passages, hailing triumph and empowerment to the natural form.

In this exhibition the object, process, and practice of Painting is discussed, dissected, decomposed and re-interpreted by three artists who take on different approaches to find a common ground, one that relishes in the instability and fleeting significance of cultural statements. History is welcomed to take on alternate identities, whether the history of painting, of the self, or of the world at large. Noiret-Thome appreciated the structure and geometric perfection of the spiderweb, Tschape swells in the fluidity of water and the shapes subsequently painted, and Mulder combines forms derived from culture and nature to emphasize impermanence. Here, nature is more ephemeral than ever before, and the structures existing within its multi-faceted forms are given credence through the artistic practice.