Joanna Fiduccia

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  interviews June 08, 2015

  Christine Rebet

  Christine Rebet is an artist who has worked across diverse media and with traditional animation for over ten years. Her debut solo gallery exhibition in New York, “Paysage Fautif,” features drawings made in Haiti as well as a new hand-drawn film, all of which she discusses below. The show is on view at Bureau until June 14, 2015.

  I’VE BEEN MAKING ANIMATIONS since 2002, when I received a grant to study with a team of DDR-era animators in Berlin. There, I learned how to animate in 35 mm, and I have stayed faithful to this traditional technique, even as I’ve watched the medium obsolesce. I decided

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  picks May 15, 2015

  Pam Lins

  To reach the main gallery of Pam Lins’s “Model Model Model,” the viewer must first pass through a gauntlet of hand-built ceramic phones, calling to mind less the art-historical corridor of Pop art than the hall of a community center. Along with their pedestals, priority mail boxes sloshed with paint, the works are as homely and economical as the notion of a model itself: dummy, replica, didactic—in short, not quite sculpture. Beyond the telephones, five tables built from Enzo Mari’s 1974 open-source designs host some thirty earthenware constructions, which Lins has rendered from photographs of

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  picks March 27, 2015

  Victor Man

  Light them as you will; Victor Man’s nocturnal paintings insist on their place in the long, dark corridor of art history. Their subjects emerge from the gloaming, buoyed by a bright tunic or foulard—or a gloss of Picasso, Balthus, or Mantegna—that hovers, almost protectively, over his tenderly rendered models. Yet Man is no timeless painter. His citations follow a historical dialogue between painting and photography, with precedents from Manet to Richter, here extended discerningly into our century. In Grafting/or Lermontov Dansant Come [sic] Saint Sebastien, 2014, the “double exposure” of a

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  picks August 25, 2014

  Aaron Curry

  The Day-Glo figures gamboling through Aaron Curry’s retrospective “Bad Brain” seem like an answer to Wallace Stevens’s lament for modern imagination, written exactly a century ago. For the poet of “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” all marvelous fancies have abandoned the middle-class mind, haunted henceforth only by the soberest ghosts.

  Curry's exhibition is haunted, too, but with the exuberant nightgowns that Stevens was missing: “purple with green rings/ or green with yellow rings/ or yellow with blue rings.../ with socks of lace/ and beaded ceintures” — or, say, Picasso with H.C. Westerman,

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  picks June 04, 2014

  Ry Rocklen

  One can spy the first objects in this exhibition from the street: a beanbag chair and a marble table decked with an elaborate floral arrangement, like the collision of a condominium lobby and a basement rec room. Only, the marble is laminate, and the struts holding it aloft are not polished brass, but cheap trophy components, while the beanbag, for its part, has been carefully, even lovingly tiled—a mosaic technique that Rocklen has plied in the past on a gamut of domestic cast-offs, from old mattresses to ratty rugs.

  In the main space of the gallery, this disposition to preserve domestic life

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  picks June 02, 2014

  Sanya Kantarovsky

  You can leave your antihistamines at the door. “Allergies,” the title of Sanya Kantarovsky’s first solo exhibition in New York, might best be taken like the old pharmakon: an irritant in the largely bloodless body of contemporary painting that acts, marvelously, as a philter. The eighteen works here are huge in ambition and gratification. Kantarovsky’s work was formerly mood driven, vignettes centered around a dandy in states of creative duress. In these recent paintings, the artist has plunged headfirst into the headiest relations: power struggles between genders and classes, and art-historical

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  picks December 01, 2013

  Jessica Mein

  When São Paulo’s ban on outdoor advertising went into effect in 2007, it left the city’s billboards looking something like Jessica Mein’s paintings: sun-blanched color fields with the scaffolds showing through, like perspective grids held up to the sky. In Mein’s case, the scaffolds are canvas stretchers, exposed not by progressive urban policy but by X-Acto knives and unthreaded hemp. The urgency of these destructive gestures is, at first blush, no clearer in Mein’s work than in any other contemporary canvas-vandal, punishing a medium without caring to indict it for anything in particular. Yet

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  picks January 04, 2013

  Andra Ursuta

  For Friedrich Schiller, our aesthetic accomplishments owe themselves to the Spieltrieb, or “play drive”: the expenditure of energy in an unimpeded outpouring of imagination. Romanian-born Andra Ursuta, an artist who plumbs bleak and benighted notions about her birthplace, might seem like the last person to evoke Schilleresque playtime in her acerbic mode of cultural anthropology–cum-sculpture. Yet a certain kind of diversion nonetheless has its day in her exhibition “Mothers, Let Your Daughters Out into the Street.” A diminutive model of a WWII bunker squats in the foyer. Cast in concrete from

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  picks April 06, 2011

  Steve Roden

  Don’t be deceived by the provinciality implied in “stone’s throw,” the title of Steve Roden’s latest exhibition—the imaginative routes in his work are as elaborate as his paintings. Bundles of boldly dappled lines congregate in murky, tectonic grounds, or hover atop motifs that stream over the canvas like so much exuberant bunting. Roden has had years of practice cultivating the impression of spontaneity in his works, but in fact his output derives from complex transductions of texts or musical scores into inscrutable visual code, with pieces here spanning collage, drawing, painting, sculpture,

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  picks November 28, 2010

  Carol Bove, Blinky Palermo, Renwick Gallery group exhibitions

  On a visit to Carol Bove’s exhibition at Kimmerich in New York last March, the gallery assistant kindly asked me to refrain from blowing on the peacock feathers. Apparently, a number of visitors had been so disarmed by Bove’s exquisite compositions that they had committed surprising lapses in decorum, and the gallery had begun preemptively beseeching the rest of us to control ourselves. Truth be told, Bove’s sumptuous mantles of feathers on canvases were enticing. In this show, arrangements of organic, ornamental, and industrial materials participated in a familiar conversation about display,

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  print October 2010

  Goldin+Senneby

  This exhibition, “The Decapitation of Money,” marked the latest installment of a project titled “Looking for Headless,” initiated three years ago by the Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby. Actually, it comprised the epilogue, though one should not thereby assume that “Looking for Headless”—an investigation of the offshore corporation Headless Ltd and its possible cloak-and-dagger correspondence with Georges Bataille’s secret society Acéphale (from a-cephalus, or “headless”), told in part through a novel (in addition to a blog, lectures, interviews, and even rumor)—is complete. For,

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  print October 2010

  Gérard Gasiorowski

  “Recommencer. Commencer de nouveau la peinture” (Starting Again: Starting the Painting Again) surveyed the career of French painter Gérard Gasiorowski (1930–1986), who began his career as a successful Photorealist in the mid-1960s and then rebelled, violently, and spent the following two decades producing abstract paintings, naive acrylic sketches, syrupy kitsch, and modest painted objects. In the atrium, where the exhibition began, curators Frédéric Bonnet and Éric Mangion introduced their strategy, an achronological presentation of the work that sought to patch through alternative narratives