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An exhibition exploring the return to figuration and representation in contemporary art
Slought is pleased to announce "Painting in the Ambivalent Present, Or The Return of the Horse" on display from November 14 to December 26, 2009.
A few centuries ago, it was impossible to go from New York to Philadelphia without a good horse; likewise, it was impossible to document an event or display a person's features without a good painting. At that time, both horseback riding and painting were nostalgic, almost aristocratic activities: markers of cultural capital as articulated by Bourdieu. Once a form of transportation, riding a horse is today a sport. Thus the question arises - will painting become the central issue in contemporary art again? What new evolution of circumstance allows for the return of an old method? Horses are required in certain geographical situations, like steep terrain, or in military strategies, like at one time in Afghanistan. In these cases, does the horse return to its original function, or is it replaced with artificial "horses," like bicycles or motorcycles? Similarly, will painting ever return to its original function or will video, holograms and other media replace it? Over time, painting and the horse underwent changes that distanced them from their original functions.
Transportation today is no longer reliant upon horses, and contemporary art, in turn, has displaced painting from its position as the primary medium of artistic expression. This exhibition, curated by Osvaldo Romberg, explores the return in contemporary art to a kind of figuration that was despised and rejected by the cultural vanguardism of the twentieth century. Through a superb command of painterly techniques, the artists featured in this exhibition -- Vincent Desiderio, Natalie Frank, and Yigal Ozeri -- interrogate the role of the public in their choice of an imagery that can be seen as immediately pleasing or immediately disturbing.
In conjunction with the paintings of Natalie Frank featured in the exhibition, Slought announces "90 Days: Testimony and Possibilities", on display through December 1, 2009.
Over the course of 90 days in 1994, at least half a million minority Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed by fellow Rwandans with the implicit permission of a passive international community. Voices of Rwanda films testimonies of Rwandans who lived through the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Through oral history, Voices of Rwanda attempts to create a space for the witness to share his or her life story, and by bringing these stories to a wider public, the listener ultimately becomes another witness to history.
Claudine and Adele are two individuals that are also the subject of paintings by Natalie Frank, who visited Rwanda to embark on a collaborative project with Voices of Rwanda. Frank visited several of the women who had shared their testimonies with Voices of Rwanda and photographed each individual as a reference for the portraits. The collaboration between a figurative painter, an oral history project, and survivors themselves raises questions about how history, and more specifically the complexity of human atrocities and genocide, are represented by outsiders and communicated to the world. Frank's portraits stand alone as individual works, yet when viewed in conjunction with segments of actual testimonies, one is reminded of the limitations of each form and the perspectives we bring to them.
One less acknowledged consequence of the Rwandan genocide is the rupture of the oral tradition. The reasons for this phenomenon are many, among them a destroyed trust within communities, which at times destroyed the very idea of community itself, and the difficulty of asserting one's personal narrative as the nation attempts to redefine its global image. This oral history project thus opens up a space in Rwanda for survivors to talk about their own experiences, one that enables them to create a second space with their words. It also attempts to instantiate this space on the level of the archive, one that implicates viewers across space and time. However, there is a tension here between our aspirations for the power of testimony and art to contribute to genocide prevention, and what these responses ultimately enact. Another tension concerns the impossibility of communicating and portraying a survivor's experience. This exhibition acknowledges these limitations, yet still attempts to provide a lens for us to listen and see.
For more information about Voices of Rwanda, please visit www.voicesofrwanda.org
Vincent Desiderio's paintings amaze with the gorgeous richness of his technique. His highly cultivated allegories move the viewer deeply, but carefully evade sentimentality. Though his technique is conservative, he uses completely contemporary perspectives to depict his realities. The differences in scale presented in his triptychs, for example, resonate with movie editing. These contradictions between his subjects, his classical technique, and his reference to film make his work semiotic labyrinths in which his theoretical ideas combine with everyday life.
Natalie Frank succeeds in combining a fluid, seemingly improvised style with very careful compositions and geometric patterns. Her direct way of rendering her subjects with plastic brushstrokes is a sophisticated way of describing their psychological moods. In each painting, there is always the inclusion of objects that contrast formally with the human figure. These apparent contradictions serve to reinforce the work's drama.
Yigal Ozeri's paintings seem to fit into a category of realism so illusionistic that people have doubts about the medium; they believe they are painted-over photographs. But in fact, the first approach to Ozeri's work is not about realism, but about the sensual pantheism overcoming reality, driving us to a world where nature involves every element depicted in the picture. Nature and female bodies are seemingly melted in a delicate sensitivity. At a second glance, this is permanently altered by the psychological gaze of the women models who contradict the tenderness of the environment. This ambivalence makes the paintings extremely original and enigmatic; at the same time, it makes the viewer reflect about the future of sexuality.