| Artist Laurance Rassin, director of the New Blue Riders, is teaming up with the Durst Organization and Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl (CCOC) to create awareness and funding for not-for-profit organizations through Simply Blue, his first major solo show at Condé Nast’s exhibition space in Manhattan. The exhibition, curated by Lanny Powers, is open to the public from April 28 to June 4, with a cocktail reception on May 6, to be held at the Condé Nast Building. For this exhibition, the artist has put together a virtual parade of canvases and objects that reflect an inquisitive mind and a mature application of recognizable style and working methods. |  |
Bruce Helander
Artist Laurance Rassin, director of the New Blue Riders, is teaming up with the Durst Organization and Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl (CCOC) to create awareness and funding for not-for-profit organizations through Simply Blue, his first major solo show at Condé Nast’s exhibition space in Manhattan. The exhibition, curated by Lanny Powers, is open to the public from April 28 to June 4, with a cocktail reception on May 6, to be held at the Condé Nast Building.
For this exhibition, the artist has put together a virtual parade of canvases and objects that reflect an inquisitive mind and a mature application of recognizable style and working methods. As a painter, Rassin creates colorful interlocking passages and mysterious interiors accented by abstracted figures and theatrical faces, which set up a complicated narrative that brings the viewer closer to the picture plane. In this latest series of impasto, oil-based canvases, most with a space age theme, the artist has constructed a mix of almost cinematic fantasy and reality that combine an expressionist’s sensibility of bold color and exaggerated forms, and offer a visual short story of science fiction and romance.
Rassin has a voracious appetite for a mesmerizing marathon of activity. Often he incorporates a picture within a picture, which doubles the adventure layer by layer, and offers an odd hybrid of a de facto fourth dimension that considerably expands the limited parameters of traditional painting. A painted blue frame surrounds Woman in Repose (2009) with a diverse audience of portraits, all sharing space in a split-level surrealist penthouse. The artist often sweeps off his primed canvas, and finds his way onto a variety of surfaces, like engaging tapestries and textiles that are hand-woven in Persia, giving his imagery a foreign, luxurious utilitarian spirit.
It is exactly this type of departure that brings together all types of materials that can be manipulated into a varied, albeit recognizable, common denominator for the artist to seize upon. Searching the horizon like an early explorer for a new passage around traditional routes, Rassin has a strong, wide footprint, and is constantly breaking new ground. Perhaps taking a cue from contemporary stars like Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince (who created designs for Louis Vuitton handbags), Damien Hirst (spin paintings on jeans) or Jeff Koons, Rassin has successfully transferred a blueprint from his original paintings onto an array of fashionable silk surfaces for women’s apparel that Saks Fifth Avenue picked up in select stores nationwide a few seasons ago. In recent runway shows of “art couture” in New York, Palm Beach, and London, Rassin becomes the complete artist/orchestrator/conductor by designing, fabricating, and fitting his bundle of printed cloth onto models who strut his surrealist style as “walking works of art,” complete with rocking background music that he has composed, and is often accompanied with his band, New Blue Riders, which he fronts and sings lead vocals.
His latest foray into an experimental extension of his palette are ceramic-based and kiln-cooked forms that, like Picasso’s clay work in the south of France, incorporate the identical style of the aggressive painting with which the artist has become identified. In this series of fired ceramic sculpture, which was included in the latest auction of decorative arts at Bonhams, Rassin has been able to wrap a basic figurative shape with a brightly painted exterior that has a multitude of sides, like an early cubist experiment. Rassin has also utilized the same transferable formula to small, cast bronzes and musical instruments that carry the same harmonious and fearless visual tune.
