“In the early 1990‘s it was very evident the computer was changing the mystery genre as we knew it. ’Place' as we know it does not exist in the cyber world, this confluence of media is redefining the lines between what we refer to as fiction and reality. Each diptych from the ”Mysteries“ has a chronology: the scene on the left is the past of the scene on the right, which is its future. But the chronology is incomplete. The time n the pictures is as broken up as the space.”

James J. Williams III
Leave a stain
30 MAY— 6 JULY 2013. WED – SUN. 12 - 6
OPENING 30 MAY 6-8PM
 
envoy enterprises is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by James J. Williams III, Leave a stain. Each element of the show represents a farewell letter. Together they form a set acting as and waiting for the curtain call.
With each work Williams expresses how ritual and objects can be a method of release, even as the person, the place, the self has already said goodbye.
The installation is a series of pleas for acknowledgement as they hover over farewells. Some somber, some bitter, some vicious and vacant. As the viewer moves through the set each piece is a skin shed, a bridge burned. Leave a stain is one last plea for regard and becomes the voice calling back, “Let go.”
 
James J. Williams III is a Brooklyn native, is an artist, curator and creative director. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, London, Paris, and Washington DC. Since 2003 James has served as the director and founder of the Thorstein Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Opium Magazine, Art Cal, NY Art Beat, Lapiz, Double Magazine and The New York Times.

et al Projects is excited to present new artwork by Julian Lorber. This is Lorber’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will mark the second anniversary of the gallery’s new location in Bushwick with Lorber’s vivid works that include a multidisciplinary display of paintings, photography, and sculpture. Coming off his recent solo exhibition in Europe this past February, which was titled Externalities, Julian Lorber’s exhibition at et al Projects is untitled and continues this momentum with a display of his ability and drive to create intriguing, dynamic art.
 
Lorber has created works from observing the visual effects of urban soot on architecture and interiors and the paint build-up from graffiti writing and outdoor mural painting. Other sources for his works include makeup and automotive spray coating. What these materials and applications are actually adding to the language of painting is part of what the artist is interested in showing us. His process of mixed media layering is what he considers as creating his own “architecture of pollution.” The artist has also included window soot into some of the works as a material metaphor. Moving towards the surface, the artist intensifies the viewing experience with color shading and has an illusory balance of surface and depth. Thinking about economics and the growth of industry and its effects on our culture, Lorber asks questions about a system that is a disconnect between the society in which we live and the natural world that the system relies on. Subverting material hierarchies and confronting the negative and positive externalities around him, Lorber presents his art as a science fiction, and puts the urban environment as the driving force behind human visual experience.
 
May 17 thru June 17, 2013
Opening Reception: May 17, 7pm-10pm
Artist Talk: June 16, 12pm
 
Julian Lorber is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He produces art using paint, drawing, collage, video, sculpture and installation art and has exhibited internationally. He has been interviewed in NY Arts Magazine, Frontrunner Magazine and LVL3. His works have been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Arte- Fuse and Studio Visit Magazine, curated by Ian Berry, Senior Director at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
 
et al projects | 56 Bogart | Brooklyn NY | 11206 | info@etalprojects.com | 914-498-8328

Evan’s paintings primarily focus on the purely natural California landscapes surrounding him. To Evans, the places he paints are precious. They are close to his home, while not part of his everyday life; places driven past or walked by unnoticed in the usual course of events, blending in with the neutral gray of the common place-trees invisibly growing, clouds drifting by, the river flowing on and on without calling attention to itself. For Evans, each of these places holds vibrant secrets of intimacy and grandeur which, when revealed, revives him with life sustaining energy and a peaceful awareness of being embraced and protected by the whole world.
 
“Equilibrium is a state of balance between opposing forces, influences or effects. My work in creating landscape paintings involves the art of balancing compositional elements of water to sky, sky to earth, shadow to light, and original to reflection. As a painter I seek to strike a balance between the tactility of paint on the surface of the canvas and the illusion of depth and distance. As a member of a complex technological society I struggle to balance work and play, the conflicting economic forces of art and business, and the range of emotions in personal relationships. The contemplation of pure nature and the activity of artistic expression help me to find and keep my balance.” Christopher Evans 2013
 
Born in 1954 in Bremerton, WA, Christopher Evans trained in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. This is his third Solo Exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery.

Fred Torres and Alain Briscadieu-Farjas are very excited to present works by nine French masters. An opening reception will be held this Thursday, May 30th from 6-8pm.
 
The exhibition marks a unprecedented demonstration of contemporary French talent, the first major New York exhibition of painter Jean-Claude Farjas, and an introduction to our newest artist, photographer Seb Janiak. A limited-edition catalogue will be available to accompany this exhibition, featuring a critical essay by Carter Ratcliff, The Art of Reverie.
 
“From the earliest days of the republic, American artists followed France’s lead. So did the artists of many other countries. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Americans felt a new sense of independence. New York took the place of Paris as the capital of advanced art and New Yorkers paid little attention to the world beyond their city—or, to be more precise, beyond the island of Manhattan. In recent decades, borders have been blurred. Visions have enlarged and the world of art has become international. Nonetheless, French art is still underrepresented in New York, which has meant that the legacy of a great visionary tradition has not been felt for decades... As the title of this exhibition notes, we share the same sky. We share as well the power to determine for ourselves the nature of everything the light of that sky reveals.”
 
— Carter Ratcliff
 
from The Art of Reverie

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
 
PETER ALLEN HOFFMANN OUTER SPACE @ FREIGHT+VOLUME, MAY 30-JULY 6, 2013
 
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
― John Berger
 
In John Berger’s classic treatise on art and artists (and subsequent popular BBC television series) Ways of Seeing, he describes how the act of looking at an object, person or landscape with fresh eyes each time enables the viewer to actually convert the subject through his own vision, giving meaning by the act of seeing. In a later essay, The Shape of a Pocket, Berger states: The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles. Nowhere is this pursuit more evident than in the paintings of Peter Allen Hoffmann, bringing his first solo show in five years to Freight+Volume with a new body of work, Outer Space, at the end of May.
 
About the show’s title, Hoffmann writes, I‘m fascinated by the ways in which an image or object can be a symbol which is universally understood, and yet cannot be considered a cliche…The concept of outer space is a projection of our own feelings of possibility, as well as a projection of our fears— whether it’s imagining aliens, nothingness, or death. It‘s the spatial equivalent of the other, a mirror of ’inner‘ space.
 
The canvases in Outer Space range in size and subject matter, even style, dramatically – from formal abstractions steeped in color theory, such as Viibryd, to lush, old master-style renditions of bucolic pastoral scenes and still lives. The majority of his larger abstract work is influenced by American pieced quilts, while scenes like Ithan Creek, At Ballybawn or Still Life with Pomegranate seem lifted from prints in dusty museum catalogs or nineteenth century artist collectives, with particular references to Courbet, Rembrandt and deMolijn. About the quilt-paintings, he writes,
 
The process of crafting these quilts is similar to how I approach the paintings— a lengthy process of detailed planning, and then execution. Women worked from existing traditional patterns, but also processed and interpreted these patterns based on their own personal, religious, regional, and historical context…the metaphor of the pieced quilt extends to the other work as well. While the sources of the imagery are disparate — art historical, observed from life, abstraction — they exist for me equally as images I have experienced, continue to experience, and for whatever reason, cannot let go.
 
But whether realist, landscape, or abstracted subject matter, the theme remains consistent: the artist is in a constant process of revising and revisiting his own and other artists’ work. What seems to be a landscape is a really a painting of another artist’s 19th century version of a landscape; what appears to be five color stripes on a canvas is actually an interpretation of another geometric canvas, from another era. The role Hoffmann plays is to sample these various eras and techniques and styles, much like a rapper or composer edits and samples snippets of other musicians’ work into his own composition. Never exactly copied or appropriated, these works are distinctly painted with Hoffmann’s unique brushwork and paint handling. Despite his multiple degrees of removal from the subject, his specific approach lends an indelible stamp of personality on each one. He sums it up this way: I don’t see the distance between the historical and the contemporary in art as being significant: the context may change, but the content remains the same.
 
Hoffmann conceptually and radically expands the expression “a painter’s painter” into three or four dimensions – a painter’s painter’s painter, and so forth – implying that artists tend to paint the same scene over and over, copying each other through the centuries, until the source is obscured entirely. In one work in particular, 9 Years, he has worked and reworked the same canvas for literally nine years. Hoffmann seems to say, despite the existence of cave art, there is no original, “first” painting any more than an original, first artist; the evolution of art is about repetition and constant self-referral, a continued sampling – back and forth – of what came before and what will come to be.
 
Peter Allen Hoffmann received his MFA from Hunter College of CUNY in 2005, and his BFA from Bard College in 2001; he has had numerous solo and group shows at Freight+Volume, The Painting Center in NY, Thomas Robertello in Chicago, the Wexford Art Centre in Ireland among many others. He has received awards and travel grants from Hunter College, CUNY and Cow House Studios in Ireland. His work has been reviewed extensively in a variety of national and international art and literary publications, including Art Korea, The Chicago Tribune, and Useless magazine. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
Please join us for a public reception with the artist on Thursday, May 30th from 6-9pm. For more information please contact Nick Lawrence @ 212-691-7700 or nick@freightandvolume.com.

Friedman Benda presents Campana Brothers: Concepts, the renowned Brazilian designers’ first solo gallery show in the U.S., from June 5-July 3, 2013.  An opening reception will be held at the gallery on June 5, from 6-8 PM.
 
Loose and experimental in nature, Concepts will see the Campanas exploring a series of new approaches to their practice while overturning previously held certainties and expectations. They will introduce several new bodies of work that demonstrate a different direction, while offering a complex and in-progress view of their practice as it stands during a pivotal moment in their careers.
 
The five new series exhibited at Concepts include:
 
Boca series—cowhide wall-mounted bookshelf, table, and standing shelf
 
Racket collection—chairs and a screen in bent brass with a nylon stitched base and a hand-stitched motif made from remnant Thonet chair backings
 
Fitas —a buffet, cabinet, and table made from bent steel
 
Ametista collection—a series of glass hanging panels adorned with Sao Paulo-sourced amethyst rocks
 
Alligator — new banquette this time created out of a series of life-like stuffed alligators

Friedman & Vallois will present for the first time in New York a solo exhibition of Irish sculptor Patrick O’Reilly. The exhibition will open Thursday, June 13 and will run through September 28, 2013. The exhibition «New Works in Bronze» will highlight a broad over- view of his artistic creativity through twenty-eight bronze sculptures all made between 2009 and 2013.
 
Born in 1957, Patrick O’Reilly, has exhibited in Dublin, Berlin, Lon- don, Paris, Athens, Brussels and even in China and enjoys a strong international reputation. He reveals himself as a multidisciplinary artist: street artist, performer, dj, assemblagist and sculptor for whom monumental scale does not frighten.
 
His work draws from both classical and Mannerist influences as well as from the imagery of contemporary comic and pop art.
 
The universe he constructs evokes reverie, poetry and especially childhood themes through its iconic animal, the teddy bear which O’Reilly brings back to life with his own sensiblility, humor and playfulness as portrayed in «Ballet Bear» and «Drummer».
 
«Cernunnos» half man half stag and god of prosperity and seasons, father of the Gauls, and archaic divinity, as well as «Flight» or «Bull» belong to the bestiary of O’Reilly’s canon of imagery in which Celtic mythology still holds a strong influence for may Irish.
 
The human-animal hybridization of «Anvil Man» a playful crossbreeding, recalls the singular ability of particular to Ireland in marring marry humor and seriousness, reason and imagination.