Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to announce its inaugural opening with “Shadows Slipping”, an exhibition of new works by Angelina Gualdoni, on view from September 23 through November 6, 2010. The gallery is located at 537B West 23rd Street, New York, NY.

Angelina Gualdoni begins her paintings by pouring thin veils of paint directly onto the canvas. By allowing the liquid to articulate the basis of her painting, Gualdoni relinquishes control, and then wields it back by marking strange objects uncomfortably on the surface pool. Structures build on the outlines of the stains, or leap out against the watery passages, or simply follow the odd paths that the liquid has chosen to flow. Gualdoni’s paintings posit a world where the known and the tangible lie always outside our reach, slipping into and out of shadows. Constant tensions of emptiness and being, object and field, movement and stasis permeate her work. Shadows march into the forefront, and objects recede against the diffusive stains. Gualdoni’s earlier series investigated failed utopias of Modern architecture, portraying decaying and imploding buildings crumbling into pools of paint. In “Shadows Slipping”, she extracts the essence of the decay, by leaving the viewer to question what is coming into being, and what is falling apart.

In an accompanying series, Gualdoni’s collages amplify the confusion of scale that occurs in her work. Within the paintings, a dab of paint might suggest a vase, a planet in a primordial cosmic stew, or a boulder levitating in the air, likewise in her collages photographic elements collapse spatial specificity.

Gualdoni writes, “The shift in the work, compared to previous bodies, is in favor of improvisation, and against a photographic basis, in favor of degrees of presence, against “the void” as strictly a desolate absence, towards a condition of use that is in the spirit of Lauterbach’s reading of “As Is”.

“As is” suggests the distance from perfection which the object has traveled through the course of time, its fall from Platonic grace of virgin purity. “As is” is a variant of “as if,” the way in which desire ineluctably turns into fulfillment or disappointment and in that turn, “something” is simultaneously lost and found.

-Ann Lauterbach, “As (It) Is: Towards a Poetics of the Whole Fragment”, 1999.

Angelina Gualdoni’s work has been exhibited extensively, including at the Saint Louis Art Museum, MOCA Chicago, the Aldrich Museum, the Museum de Paviljoens in the Netherlands, and Saatchi Gallery’s “Triumph of Painting 5” in London. She has been the recipient of a NYFA grant, a Pollock-Krasner grant, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and an inaugural Artadia grant at ISCP in New York.