Firework Explosions Captured on Paper — Rosemarie Fiore featured @ The Creators Project

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

By Noémie Jennifer 

"Painters usually have to work with the element of gravity, with paint dripping down. With me it's the opposite. My materials want to shoot up, and the challenge is to force them down onto the paper," explains Rosemarie Fiore on the phone from Los Angeles, where a show of her paintings opened last weekend at Von Lintel Gallery. The works, which feature circular pools of rich colors, make up a new series entitled Eclipse. Like planets orbiting silently, they cross each other’s paths and seem to vibrate on the paper.

 

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #21, 2015, 28x 28 inches

Fiore lives and works in the Bronx and has been using found machinery to create artwork since her residency at Skowhegan, completed after her years in graduate school. Her first experiments with fireworks began during a stint in Roswell, New Mexico, with an accident. “I was lighting off a smoke bomb and dropped it, and as it moved it left a blue dotted line,” she says.

Photo by Ross Willows, courtesy of Rosemarie Fiore Studio and ART OMI, Ghent, NY

Since then she has crafted increasingly sophisticated tools to capture color and smoke. “At first I was just duct taping fireworks to a broomstick and dragging it along the paper,” she says. Now her laboratory includes various containers on wheels, with spouts specially designed so the lit smoke bombs hit the paper with the right pressure. The tools are perpetually in development: “While I’m creating the work, I’ll see that I can add a new extension. I’m always editing the tools and developing things.” For the Eclipse series, she modified a trash can lid and named it "Space Oddity."

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

Since then she has crafted increasingly sophisticated tools to capture color and smoke. “At first I was just duct taping fireworks to a broomstick and dragging it along the paper,” she says. Now her laboratory includes various containers on wheels, with spouts specially designed so the lit smoke bombs hit the paper with the right pressure. The tools are perpetually in development: “While I’m creating the work, I’ll see that I can add a new extension. I’m always editing the tools and developing things.” For the Eclipse series, she modified a trash can lid and named it "Space Oddity."

She describes her process as a meditative dance on top of the paper, carried out in silence—these are smoke bombs, not fireworks with gun powder. “Some machines move better than others. It’s like a dance partner: when you have a good partner, you don’t have to force anything. You can anticipate each other’s movements and move together smoothly.” The dance has strict time limits: once the smoke bombs run out of pigment, the show is over.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #52, 2015, 28x 28 inches

The Eclipse works are pared down compared to the larger paintings Fiore previously made with smoke bombs, which used collage to create hectic, layered compositions. “This show is much more about the simplicity of the smoke, about the colors interacting and creating subtle depths.” The use of a smooth printmaking paper also helped to yield those dreamy hues.

Larger pieces in this series are in the works. In coming months, Fiore will be collaborating with the metals department at UNC Greensboro to create a huge “eclipse maker tool” four feet in diameter.

Rosemarie Fiore, Smoke Eclipse #42, 2015, 28x 28 inches

 Read full feature @ The Creators Project

ANTONIO MURADO | DISTANCES, June 27 — Aug 15, 2015

 

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by New York artist, Antonio Murado. Distances marks the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

Murado is a technical virtuoso who returns to familiar motifs to continue experimenting with the capacity of paint to express the realities of nature. Whereas many artists lament the mind’s habitual reflex to interpret a horizontal piece as a landscape, Murado embraces it. His work hinges upon illusion as he conjures forms without actually rendering them. From a distance, latitudinal swipes of rusted orange or chartreuse green anchor apparent twinkling cityscapes or mountain ranges. But in actuality, the works are deft striations of pigment impressed with textural patterns.

Similarly, material investigation and process reinvigorate traditional conceits of still life. Canvases are treated with delicate, transparent layers of oil and turpentine that underwrite pools of paint, blown with air. The shapes may mimic flower petals floating in mid-air or across a flow of water, but it is gesture that reigns here over figuration.

“The results of these experiments in alchemical materiality is a variegated series of paintings that, with infinite nuance, convey Murado’s own plastic versions of the different domains of the life of nature.” —Alexandre Melo, ArtForum.

Murado was born in Lugo, Spain in 1964 and graduated from the University of Salamanca. Shown internationally in multiple solo and group exhibitions around the world, Murado’s paintings are now held in prominent museum, corporate, and private collections including The Galician Center of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Museum of Fine Art, Vitoria, Spain; The Nagasaki Art Museum, Japan; and in the collections of Phillip Morris, American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, AXA, Pfizer, and The Coca-Cola Corporation.

CATHERINE HOWE — CONTINUED AND RECOMMENDED, APRIL 2015 | artscene.com

Painter Catherine Howe's new work experiments with different methods and materials, all of which are a testament to her unbridled enthusiasm for the medium. Two of the seven works exhibited, almost all of which are indebted to both the imagery and quiet mournfulness of Dutch still-life painting, are "Reverse Paintings," where swirling brushstrokes of blooms and vases in acrylic, marble dust, and oil-based ink are painted on the reverse side of polyester sheeting. The effect is soft and almost ghostly, more of a memory of a painting than a living, breathing one. Similarly, "Mica Painting (Geisha)" utilizes mica pigment suspended in acrylic resin to create a shimmering and pale surface upon which gesso floral forms droop and dance. Finally, there are three "Carborundum and Silver" paintings, created by scattering sparkling carborundum dust on undulating, mostly abstract shapes that Howe painted in a clear gel. Working with this essentially blind process, our heightened awareness of the elements of intuition, memory and automatism (one of the works ended up revealing cat and mouse forms, which she references in its title) lend gravitas to the eye-catching works (Von Lintel Gallery, Culver City).

Kristen Osborne-Bartucca

Read more @ artscene

CATHERINE HOWE | Supreme Fiction | March 7 — April 18, 2015 - Opening Photos

CATHERINE HOWE | Supreme Fiction | March 7 — April 18, 2015

 

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York artist, Catherine Howe. Supreme Fiction is the artist's third solo show with the gallery. 

The unrestrained brushwork in Howe’s anarchic paintings inject raw emotion into docile subject matter, like flowers in a vase. By using the historical idiom of still-life as the anchor, Howe mashes the heroics of action-painting with the humility of vanitas tableaux.

Rather than focus on intimate observation, Howe operates on memory and feeling to invest mutable mediums with immense physicality. Pushing buckets of clear gloss over titanium molding paste, nascent forms become visible only after a dusting of carborundum grit (traditionally used to smooth lithography stone) and a final sweep of a broom. A self-proclaimed materials fiend, Howe also experiments with mica interference pigment suspended in acrylic resin to lend a refractive, iridescence to the canvas ground.

While the works explode with movement and texture, Howe restricts herself with respect to color. A stark palette emphasizes the expressive, psychological gestures seemingly unleashed during manic creative outputs. Howe qualifies the entire process as one of alchemy. As Michéle C. Cone writes in a recent catalogue essay, “Maybe, Howe’s evocative paintings are not about still life per se, but about the naming of things transposed into paint, and the magical interaction between medium, memory and perception.”

Born in Western New York in 1959, Howe received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1983. The many publications that have reviewed her work include Art in America, Artforum, Art Critical, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over twenty years, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with an essay by David Ebony.

Canan Tolon looks for meaning in a pixilated landscape | LA TIMES REVIEW

Canan Tolon, "Untitled 6.10," 2014.

Review

Canan Tolon looks for meaning in a pixilated landscape

November 14, 2014

Canan Tolon’s paintings at Von Lintel Gallery look like smudged, streaky photocopies or off-register photographic mishaps. Their serial imagery — mostly landscapes — skips and stutters across the surface in irregular horizontal bands. They feel right at home amid L.A.’s topography of low-slung, sun-baked boxes.

Yet there is no photographic or even illustrative process at work here. The paintings are thoroughly abstract: nothing but black oil paint pressed and scraped over white surfaces. Some are tinted with pale washes of color that lend them a sepia-toned nostalgia, but the purely black-and-white works are most striking for their stark elegance and uncanny verisimilitude. The viewer flits rapturously between recognition and wonder.

The paintings highlight our tendency to look for recognizable forms. A black smudge suggests a barren hillside; a series of dashes conjures the uprights of a parking garage. The works rely on our familiarity with sequential imagery: contact sheets, the spare, repetitious motifs of modern architecture and the catalogs of building types created by the New Topographics photographers.

They are also perhaps a comment on the degraded quality of our image landscape. We are so used to pixilated, grainy, low-resolution images that the slightest smudge can conjure worlds. But the works also point to the basis of all representation: the desire to recognize something familiar, even if in the end it turns out to be just paint.

LA TIMES