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ARTCAT



Larry Bamburg / Fabienne Lasserre / William Villalongo

PICK

Esso Gallery
531 West 26th Street, 212-560-9728
Chelsea
March 10 - April 15, 2006
Reception: Friday, March 10, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site


The exhibition brings together for the first time the work of these three young artists demonstrating three completely different possibilities of making art. Without analyzing similarities or differences between their practices, this exhibition defines and describes three different approaches and the functions fulfilled by these artists in the use of images for the creation of their own personal language. Much of the work subverts traditional forms with an unconventional use of materials and content. A sort of aesthetic rebellion and subversion of institutional languages where unsettling imagery and idiosyncratic formal strategies are combined with traditional elements in a resistance towards ideological uniformity.

The materials chosen for their work is found in cheap, unfavorably looked upon substances and visual traditions (comic books, industrially produced paper and hardware), are assembled with different vocabularies in the narrative structures of each personal syntax. While perception is concerned with the grasping of significant forms, the mind finds it hard to perceive images without structural properties of shapes, lines and colors. Like in an alchemic laboratory, unrefined appearances are transformed in valuable objects and reprehensible poses, bad taste and disputed history gradually lose their weight in front of the eyes of the viewer.

Larry Bamburg’s installations work without the dominant presence of these meaningful forces; his dynamic sculptures, objects and plastic forms are reduced to the presentation of pure symbols, matter, energy, fields of tension. His realistic images have the capability of giving a body to the bone structure of ideas conveying a desirable sense of lifelike presence. By a careful examination of the whole picture, the viewer will come to realize that for example, the dead deer on the floor or the woman dancing behind the mountain is not only a maquette or a model to the artist, at the realistic level of the representation, but also his muse, the traditional allegory of truth and the fullness of life at the same time. In his work there is a fascinating interplay between the desire and the need to comprehend the total range of a phenomenon in his whole dynamism and the attractive simplicity of static concepts.

Fabienne Lasserre’s work represents the variety of her artistic interests. Her imagery is inspired by a mix of elements standing in between the abundance and power of high and of popular cultures, from religion to rural mysticism to political propaganda that she manipulates re-creating a new, personal iconographic language, whose grammar is made up of pictographic and poetic components that transcend the cultural barriers thanks to their simplicity and their universality. The anarchy and profusion in the creation of her images reminds of the exuberance and contrasts of rural myths.

The principle of change and mutability, a principle found at the heart of classical and other myths, and that governs the practice and scope of magic, is central to William Villalongo’s work. Exploring the landscapes of identity, memory, repression, and power, he re-visions images of world cultural myth and spirituality in order to produce new effigies that connect the personal and political to the natural world of the earth and body. Notions such as authenticity vs. fakeness are leveled; polymorphous and transient meanings are created and unsettle pervasive themes and associations regarding cultural identity, sexuality and the role of the artist.

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