Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the first exhibition of graphic works on paper by Ron Rocheleau. These new works are as visually intricate and intellectually engaging as Rocheleau’s infamous videos and television show, Concrete TV, which was said to be the best TV show in America by Rolling Stone magazine and voted twice as best cable show by TimeOut New York.

In this new body of work, Ron Rocheleau has reinvented his acclaimed appropriation-based, pop-cultural montage sensibility by literally cutting and pasting, by hand, images and text from contemporary art auction catalogs. At first glance, Rocheleau’s new work appears to be a page from an oversized glossy magazine that has yet to be produced, but in fact has been meticulously woven into an idiosyncratic composite. He has formed a tightly organized compression of pictures and type that serves the dual purpose of being both visually and cerebrally seductive. What is revealed on close inspection of Rocheleau’s “old school” design method is a compulsive revision of the contemporary art world through the exclusive palette of the big three auction houses; Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. The by-product of Rocheleau’s obsessive and intricate cut and paste technique is a highly evolved collage, using a particular style that makes even more sense if you are familiar with the idioms and argot of the blue-chip art market. The work literately illustrates the interconnectedness and symbiosis occurring between these artists and the industry that commodifies as well as contextualizes their production.

Asking and in part answering the question, “What if Jeff Koons collaborated with Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas?” Rocheleau’s collages commingle and conflate works by these well-known artists and hundreds more. In his collages, Rocheleau explores their aesthetic clichés and styles while taking pains to consider the over-all look and design of each of his compositions. He chooses the artists he “works with” based on a delicate balance of content, color, form and historic context. Armed with an X-acto knife, glue stick and a ruler Ron Rocheleau has managed to transform the art auction catalog into an alternative world of unlimited possibilities.