| A recent group show at The Broadway Gallery NYC in Soho brings together a diverse group of artists from around the world. The exhibition, which features Carmen Delaco, Piero Golia, Ioanna Voskou, Michel Blouin, Peter Mueller, and Ingrid Stiehler, explores ludic expressions, as seen from both figurative and abstract perspectives. Exploiting the psychological tension between figuration and formal abstraction, these works transgress boundaries of the expected, laying bare their own processes and revealing results that surprise and delight the senses. |  |
Simone Cappa
Play is on show at The Broadway Gallery NYC this month.
Carmen Delaco, Smurf. Courtesy of the artist.A recent group show at The Broadway Gallery NYC in Soho brings together a diverse group of artists from around the world. The exhibition, which features Carmen Delaco, Piero Golia, Ioanna Voskou, Michel Blouin, Peter Mueller, and Ingrid Stiehler, explores ludic expressions, as seen from both figurative and abstract perspectives. Exploiting the psychological tension between figuration and formal abstraction, these works transgress boundaries of the expected, laying bare their own processes and revealing results that surprise and delight the senses.
Curated by New York based curator Christina Zhang, the show gives the viewer the opportunity to see how compositional strategies, various approaches to technique, and a playful attitude can be a commentary on the dynamism of the creative act.
Spanish artist Carmen Delaco shines within this interesting show with her intuitive oil painting. The monolithic canvas Smurf emits a simple sophistication: wispy charcoal within a fleshy palette is reminiscent of life drawings or under painting. The work capitalizes on the fleshiness of her medium, primarily paint’s ability to replicate physical sensation and the dramatic illusion of motion. Within her voluptuous surfaces, epic fantasies spontaneously unfold, as if each brush stroke contains a dark secret: opulent and gritty all at once. The ferocity and fluidity of not only her brushstrokes, but also the shapes and colors appear effortless. With a painterly style reminiscent of Rubens and Lucian Freud, Delaco exhibits a great respect for art history, and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into the works her distinct female viewpoint. Her paintings, usually much larger than life size are strongly pigmented and give a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the figure and their surroundings—all concealed behind layers of paint.
By contrast, Ingrid Stiehler’s alluring paintings are notable for their bright palette, reduced imagery and flat areas of seductive color. Stiehler, who is based in Germany, is clearly attracted to attitudes and situations that provoke an extreme visceral answer, she is interested in developing and capturing the potency of the paint verses the subject—which is exactly what the paintings on display do. They hold up a mirror to both the banality of urban life and solitude of glamour, giving order to the barrage of mass media images and information that confront us daily. In Stiehler’s fairyland, enchantment and disenchantment coexist. These paintings are really vanitas, made from uninflected slicks of bright glossy paint—giving them a hermetically sealed, impenetrable perfection. While Stiehler’s paintings have always emphasized their luscious surfaces and simplified forms, Modern Times and As Long As The World Goes On display a strong melancholic beauty.
Retaining the surface quality and the flat economic language, the works on display in Play highlight a subject matter broadened to incorporate dramatic imagery. Mirroring a similar social commentary to Stiehler is Peter Mueller, whose triptych Lucky, Wave and Big City are a deadpan take on American pop culture. His works provide a new way of looking at and thinking about the American landscape—connecting the verbal with the visual.
Rather than play around with visual ideologies Piero Golia, utilizes himself within the exhibition as a conceptual artist. The Italian artist’s ready-made compositions are richly decadent, combining visual motifs from the natural world with imagery suggestive of human birth and fundamental emotions. Born in Naples, Piero Golia lives and works in Los Angeles. His work is the reaction of an existential decision reached from the point of no return. He expresses the heroic poetry of the extreme gesture—in this case a dialysis bag with wings—by challenging the impossible feat or legendary action. The result is an inter-play between romantic hero and alchemist.
On the other side of the gallery, Ioanna Voskou’s painting The Game Of Life retains Golia’s concern with the presence and absence of human existence and the role materialism plays with regard to feelings. Literature, painting or cinema, dreams and psychoanalysis are strong influences for Voskou’s work. In order to apprehend a reality that anyway may not exist the work appears as though viewed from a dream, a game were reality is obliged to admit its limits.
Canadian artist Michel Blouin’s art is also uninfluenced by the current trends of contemporary art. He transposes his own sensibility into colors and forms, in order to achieve a raw aesthetic that evokes the kind of honesty that is found deep within the human spirit. Mermaids and Chess Player may be understood as a logical refinement of, rather than a break with, the subjects and forms of his prior explorations, including body and landscape. Throughout, Blouin’s dexterous manipulations of paint yield works that teem with the energy of his surroundings. Applying paint with a brush or a scraper’s knife, he renders the physical form either as a subtle body fragment or as a more raucous figure.
The works in Play are a surprise to the viewer—revealing many formal relationships and concepts, as well as tracing a visual evolution from densely layered ideas of figuration to philosophical and poetic content that corresponds to many social and intellectual trends.
