Marti Cormand, Annabel Daou, Elena del Rivero, Jacob El Hanani, Daniel Robert Hunziker, Robert Jack, Alex Kvares, Marco Maggi, Stefana McClure, Renato Orara, Eduardo Santiere, Ken Solomon, Julianne Swartz, Yuken Teruya

Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Summer Shortcuts: a Drawing Forecast, a preview into the next season. For this exhibition, we invited fourteen artists to offer an insight into their most recent experimentations in the studio. The show presents a zoom into their latest developments in drawings in two or three dimensions.

Stefana McClure turns text into image. Deconstructed texts, including news/novels in three lines by Felix Feneon and excerpts from the New Thesaurus in Dictionary Form are reconfigured as continuous lengths of string and knitted. Annabel Daou also examines text and language, employing modes of translation and transliteration in English and Arabic. Her drawings of repeated words simultaneously create and eradicate meaning. Her latest works randomly map everything that happened in 2008, from personal events to world events. Elena del Rivero’s recent ongoing projects, AF Klint and The Somosi, deal with transformation, with repairing and healing materials as a metaphor for life. In some cases the surface has been gilded with gold leaf, in others the translucency of the abaca paper is visible through the marks and stitches that barely hold the works together. Daniel Robert Hunziker’s inlays are constructed from book jackets combining colors that refer to the decades in which they were published. His collages allude to Swiss constructivism and to the Duchampian tradition with their “almost ready-made” qualities, still showing traces of use with parts of the jacket text shimmering through the paper.

Robert Jack and Eduardo Santiere’s works are silent processes, osmotic and homeopathic developments governed by the imperceptible. Every surface hides a symbiotic network, whether it is scratched with a needle as in Santiere’s bio-construction landscapes, or marked with metallic ink as in Robert Jack’s new drawings. In Alex Kvares’ colored pencil drawings, the small, stitch-like marks simulate embroidery. Images are fractured to expose the formal spectacle of underlying abstraction.

Both Jacob El Hanani and Renato Orara bring drawing to an extreme, as a sort of “maximalism”. For the exhibition, they produced a drawing in collaboration. In his latest experiments, Marco Maggi pushes drawing to another dimension: the line is freed from the single plane and travels onto the six faces of Plexiglas cubes. The intricate webs etched on the Plexiglas surfaces cast sharp shadows onto their underlying platforms: drawings that don’t exist. Braille Wall is an installation of micro-drawings in stacks of slide mounts. The slide cubes form an illegible alphabet on the wall, reminiscent of Braille text.

Marti Cormand documents inconvenient migrations and relationships that emerge from odd encounters in a dumpster. In this new work, introduction to his upcoming exhibition in the fall, a discarded umbrella alters our perception of an otherwise abstract color-field painting. Ken Solomon’s “Google Portraits” are gouache and watercolor renderings of Google image searches: a “Fontana” search, results in a surprising juxtaposition of art and pin-ups, a search for “genetic optimism” leads to a visual poetry of free associations. Yuken Teruya’s colored pencil drawings on napkins relate to his ongoing “Desert Project”, a re-birth of the old perspectives of the earth, from Geocentric to Heliocentric, rendered in sculptural form with sweets. Julianne Swartz’s suspended wire drawings use the air as material. Formal and gestural, they are barely material and almost weightless.