Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity), a hand-painted installation by Adam Cvijanovic, is his third solo show at Bellwether and features a 75-foot-long painting of Los Angeles—10 minutes after gravity has failed. Houses, bungalows, lawn chairs, palm trees, surfboards, street signs, SUVs and household debris rise and swirl 14 feet above and nearly 360 degrees around the viewer. Cvijanovic has imagined a supernatural, impossible and metaphorical event and rendered its full effect on the Southern Californian suburban landscape.

Love Poem also features a 12-foot-by-12-foot painting on the front room ceiling. Recalling the frescos of Tiepelo but continuing the theme of floating domesticity found in the large piece, Cvijanovic uses the prosaic objects of his own apartment to play off the notion of the sublime inherent in looking up at the infinite vanishing point of a painted sky.

Cvijanovic’s invented technique of painting directly on Tyvek (the Dupont material used in FedEx envelopes as well as in construction of new homes) opens up the possibility of making painting completely architectural again by adhering the paper directly to the wall. With an artistic lineage dating all the way back to classical times, Cvijanovic most aptly describes his medium as, “mobile frescoes.”

Cvijanovic recently exhibited Glacier in a project curated by James Elaine at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Ideal City at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableau, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2003); and Yard, at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York (2003). Cvijanovic’s work has also been exhibited this year at Cuchifritos, Roebling Hall, NY and the VOLTAshow in Basel, Switzerland.

Adam Cvijanovic was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1960 and lives and works in New York City.

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