Gestural Abstraction

Thanks, all, much appreciated! Next time the wines will be Medardo Rosso and Medardo Bianco. Machado is, alas, the prosaic Milton, where Million (or Mullion) would have been far more striking...

Faade of my new space, with what we call the floating wall, entirely held by steel cables attached to the single concrete pillar.
CP1.jpg
Exhibition view: general
CP2.jpg
Exhibition view: front wall
CP3.jpg
Exhibition view: side wall
CP4.jpg
Exhibition view: back wall left
CP5.jpg
Exhibition view: back wall right
CP6.jpg
Exhibition view: mezzanine
CP7.jpg
 
Ah, I see how the exhibition got its name, Oswaldo. Cool looking space, especially that "floating wall."

Mark Lipton
 
Yes, So Paulo, Rua Artur de Azevedo, 51. If you send me their emails, I'd be glad to email them an invite. I'll probably open just twice a week or by appointment, otherwise I can't keep up with the posts here.
 
Really cool, Oswaldo. (Sorry, I'm overusing that word these days. A week with Cory will do that.) Best of luck.
 
Oswaldo, I love the space...and love the show. The far wall, both below and above, are really lit with flourescents? Photos look that way (digital has a way of amplifying the diffs too). Interesting.
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
Oswaldo, I love the space...and love the show. The far wall, both below and above, are really lit with flourescents? Photos look that way (digital has a way of amplifying the diffs too). Interesting.
Click to expand...

Indeed, how remarkably observant, Joel. Most of the bulbs available locally have a yellowish light that made the stark white works look jaundiced, so I had to improvise and install flourescents.

The works not under or over the mezzanine are lit with yellowish light because there I had no alternative.

My next trip to NY will be spent browsing lightbulb stores more than wine stores...
 
I'm against flourescent in theory only Oswaldo. Fact is, I use them (combined with incandescents) in my studio, but turn off the latter when it gets so hot here in summer....which means I have to live and create under flo and you know what? It's a good thing....like painting with a weighted ring on a baseball bat. Colors look so much better when shown in more balanced light. It's all relative anyway....and the flo's definitely have a spooky quality not to be overlooked.
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
I'm against flourescent in theory only Oswaldo. Fact is, I use them (combined with incandescents) in my studio, but turn off the latter when it gets so hot here in summer....which means I have to live and create under flo and you know what? It's a good thing....like painting with a weighted ring on a baseball bat. Colors look so much better when shown in more balanced light. It's all relative anyway....and the flo's definitely have a spooky quality not to be overlooked.
Click to expand...

I tried the combination too, but in the end I chose to take away all yellow light from the white works under the mezzanine, at the cost of penalizing any others that might be around them.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface, but am finding that fluorescents are being made in a variety of whites, from stark cold hospital white (that we don't want) to warmer tones that still manage to steer clear of yellow. The blue, orange and green works on the floating wall sang with the yellow light (I like your "handicap lifted" analogy), but the four small white canvases under the four small black canvases were penalized for being in a transitional zone. I had never focused this closely on lighting before, and am learning a lot. Is lighting a kind of spoof?!

Daniel, thank you.
 
The best lighting I ever experienced was when I had a studio at the American Academy in Rome for 2 months. 20 ft ceiling, all white walls and ambient light during the daytime from a skylight overhead that ran the length of the ceiling. With so much reflective surface all around and the positioning of the aperture overhead, the ambient light never felt like it had a directional source...the whole room glowed during the day. Not too warm, not too cool. Perfect for work. (Of course, one could also ask about the white on the walls too.) Electric lights can be used spoofily or not....use at your own discretion, like you did...and I understand why. Spots are tricky, depending on their focal radius.
 
It's oil on paper, so the absorption wrinkles the paper. I have no good pictures of it because the glass sort of prevented my amateurish efforts, but this may give an idea:

SergioSister.jpg
 
originally posted by Joel Stewart:
So it's 4 oil-soaked sheets mounted on a larger single sheet? Glass really does suck, doesn't it?
Click to expand...

Single sheet with four dueling rectangles of turf.

Glass does suck. Or did suck. For a while, I was happy with the new trend in glassless photography. Now I've become tired of the hipster glassless huge laminated inkjet photograph, comparing the size of its member to that of the painting tradition's. I now yearn for silver gelatin and, along with it, the stupid glass. La donna ridiculously mobile.
 
Starn twins had/have some good ideas, but even so, you don't have to put silver gelatin behind glass any more than an etching...that's my philosophy/ideology/pedantry. Small, intimate prints are glorious without glass...profound sometimes.
 
So, Oswaldo, are you planning to show your whole collection, uninterrupted, as it were, or interspersed with showings of current work by living artists? Would love to hear more comments about the individual pieces in this show...mediums, sizes, artist, why you purchased etc.
 
The collection is pretty big, so the initial idea is to show different cross-sections, changing every three months. The next show will be photographs only. The third show, coinciding with the Sao Paulo Bienal, will be about abolishing taxonomies, or blurring limits between categories. Besides fine arts, it may include decorative arts, artist's books, Murano glass, furniture, antiques, stamps, coins, guitars, taekwondo accessories, family heirlooms, lead ships, folk art, doppelgangers, even empty bottles of DRC! Anything that is, or once was, significant to me is fair game for the third show. The fourth show is undecided, but may be artists from the 80s. I'd like to do a show using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about how different social classes use taste as a form of identity, perhaps inviting a poor person, a middle class person and a rich person to pick their favorite works from the collection and show the different tastes side by side. Though most the works will have been filtered by my taste, the variety is great enough, and there's so much stuff I was given or inherited that doesn't really reflect my taste, that an interesting show might come of it. So I intend to have fun, most of all. Thoughtful fun.

Most of the artists are still alive, and I'd be open to an artist in the collection wanting to do a solo show that for some reason their gallery won't let them do.

I'll email you the checklist - it's in Portuguese, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out (otherwise let me know)

Big jeebus, Scott, only when you come back from Italy a millionaire from having plied that boyish charm on a winery heiress contessa in need of reeducation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top