Olivier Messiaen was Professor of Harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. This sounds as much a diplomatic post rather than one devoted solely to music. Perhaps it is indeed the case, that musical composition depends on relationships and on the negotiation of space and time.  That some form of rapprochement between factions is needed to co-exist is also a demand made of painting. Unfortunately, one sees entirely too much easing of tensions – but not in Tomescu.

The new paintings of Aida Tomescu take many of their titles from the composer Messiaen and whilst she is appropriately reluctant to see her works as anything other than the resolution of their own demands and desires, the ecumenical approach that Messiaen took to music, from cultures outside of the western canon – Hindu rhythms and Japanese music for example, demonstrate something that is fundamental to Tomescu’s mature painting. 

More than ever before Tomescu’s paintings reject the monotheism and orthodoxies of the western canon – less so the art history that has always been the foundation of her passion and shapes an essential understanding of painting, but her increasing use of colour as a profound structural element, something Messiaen would’ve assented to, and critically the relationships that exist between time and music, between time and painting and between colour and sound.

The chromesthesia that Messiaen embraced – seeing colour as chords and vice versa is something that one might easily ascribe or rather adopt in looking at Tomescu’s increasingly symphonic works. For these are paintings where pitch and crescendo, silence and transition work, as Messiaen would’ve wanted, in harmony. 

The installation of Messiaen in the new FOX JENSEN/SYDNEY will allow for the presentation of Tomescu’s work with appropriate scale and generosity. Each panel that Tomescu paints is made at full reach. This calibration to body feels crucial to the works capacity to invite attention through sensation as much as through cognition. 

The presentation of each panel as an open field where the body of the pigment, in concert with the of constructive strokes, promotes colour itself as a structuring element – one that opens the space, granting access to both a concrete and a metaphorical architecture where one experiences their rhythms, transitions and intricacies. 

As diptychs and triptychs, the physical extent of the paintings becomes truly panoramic and the invitation they extend to move along their full breadth gives these paintings an amplitude and volume that is heightened even further.

New colours – yellow and violet, orange and luminous whites invest the paintings with an incandescence and celebration that mark her most compelling works.

Fox Jensen Sydney is thrilled to be presenting Messiaen, Tomescu’s fifth solo exhibition with the galleries. 

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But as much as these paintings have flowers as their subject, they are, as Juliet described of Romeo “a rose by any other name would smell so sweet.” For the inherent quality of these ‘flower paintings’ is less the flower and more the paint. Their essential character, like Montague, ought not to be captive of the name.

Each painter here uses their shared material in profoundly differing ways and yet each arrive at the conclusion that these fragile motifs insinuate something fundamental to our fugitive existence. But let’s not be so bleak… for as poignant as each is, there is a celebratory spirit that overcomes the rhythm of decay. Furthermore, their vivacity as paintings, their precociousness and their material poetry is really what is at stake.

Lawrence Carroll’s Untitled 2014-17 will always be for Emma and I, one of the most poignant works we have ever presented. We had, on Lawrence’s invitation, journeyed to Bolsena, north of Rome and spent two days in his company, in his studio and in the extended embrace of his wife Lucy. Emma and I were charmed by them, by Lawrence, his humour, his ease and his insight – smitten by his work… and we remain so. Lawrence’s raw Arte Povera aesthetic cut a fresh and rough-hewn track right through the centre of our gallery. Then like a daylily he was gone. What we have in his absence is a sublime yet modest collage of the scavenging brilliance of Carroll. Flimsy cotton, plastic flowers and housepaint… no fine cedar stretchers here, no crisp folds of linen but there is everything one could ever desire and it exists to us as a memento vivere.

Bianca Raffaella’s paintings exist on the edge of visibility. Elusive, fleeting, dreamlike perhaps. She offers us a hint of physicality. Her blooms are barely there but what they repress in physicality they assert in atmosphere. Pigment brushes up against the linen in soft caresses that insinuate presence and form. Raffaella’s own vision impairment has ironically heightened her sensitivity, and these paintings demonstrate that the tools that we regard as crucial to recognition and apprehension, even sensation – can be substituted for other faculties if only we would close our eyes so as to see..

Gideon Rubin’s paintings share something of this understatement though his work is rooted in a knowing and astute description. He is however cautious about the amount of data required, preferring to compress his image making in favour of innuendo. Whether it is a flower, or an isolated figure, Rubin’s observation of deportment is perceptive and discerning. The undemonstrative brushwork that he employs is critical in his determination not to distract, to lead us away from the fundamentally human proposition that he makes evident with each painting. For all of this reductive clarity these are paintings that can seduce us with nostalgia, turn our heads with intimation, quicken our pulse with playful voyeurism; yet their magic lies in Rubin’s ability to make judgements about tone and placement. He and we understand that the success or otherwise depends on these being solved only as paintings.

And then there are the paintings of Niyaz Najafov. The antithesis to Raffaella’s delicacy and Rubin’s knowing observation. These full force paintings explode into existence. If Bianca’s paintings are on the edge of visibility, these are simply on the edge. These paintings are over-ripe, fecund, roiling with psychological vandalism. But amidst the intensity there is humour, doubtless dark but humour nonetheless. Niyaz’s flowers are dangerous, Triffid-like… cousins of Seymour’s demanding Venus flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors… stand close if you dare. Once the theatre of the work is understood then we are free to revel in the Soutine-like temerity of the pigment and the brushwork. There is no doubt that Najafov can draw, for his agitated line is crucial to the work, but it is the way that he masses pigment, pushing and tormenting it until it feels as if it could never have emerged from a tube, all smooth and alluringly viscous, that is most captivating.

Less voracious than Najafov but equally committed to speed and viscosity, the paintings of Robert Malherbe are most certainly the result of observation – but Malherbe’s eye is fast and restless. Like Rubin he is uploading data but doesn’t want to wait too long. Malherbe however does accumulate a great deal of memory in the end of his brush, and it becomes apparent the more we see. Like Rubin he is determined to solve the paintings on their own terms rather than be hostage to mere description, so that the works establish their own painterly veracity.

Aida Tomescu’s impressive diptych demonstrates a dramatic efflorescence – a flowering of pigment and energy across two open linen fields. This embrace of the linen as a foundational element in the spatial implications of the painting rather than an extension of the support has allowed Tomescu’s paintings to open, simultaneously outwards and inwards, establishing a physical and metaphorical space for the painting to build body and presence.

Rather than the more literal analogy of folds and petals, Tomescu delivers a folding of space where form and transition share in the ambition to make paintings of rare substance.

The post BLOOM first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

The post SOFIE MULLER – SOLITARIES first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

The allure of graphite very much lies in its capacity to attract light, dance with it and at times swallow it whole, but before it achieves this range and amplitude it has to be coaxed into actuality. 

One thinks of the sculpture of Donald Judd and his strong advocacy for the “specific object” where repetition of forms gathers their own concrete reality and don’t aspire to hidden meaning or narrative. But in both Judd and Allen, such a fundamentalist position is not always easy to defend as material, be it aluminium or graphite, it can’t help but consort with light and ensnare the colours of the environment so that the experience of the works is shaped by the space in which it and the viewer participate.

This desire to collapse the distinction between the orthodox illusionary space of painting and the viewer is not uncommon – from Fra Angelico’s monastic cells at San Marco to Rothko’s Houston Chapel. One also thinks of the extraordinary frescoes of David Novros, where the symbiosis between architecture and form, between colour and atmosphere is so collaborative so as to place us inside the painting.

The modest scale of Matthew Allen’s paintings necessarily compresses this ambition, but crucially these are paintings often calibrated to the size of the head rather than the body. Thus, we are invited into close proximity with the works in an exchange that is much more tête-à-tête than Vitruvian.

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Gustav Mahler

The best painting neatly evades language in very much the same way that Mahler suggested music does. There ought to be no surprise in this and yet most days I am asked, with varying levels of agitation – what does this painting mean? As if by simply talking about it, the work may suddenly give up its secrets. 

It is true of course that sometimes a phrase may unlock something in the apprehension of a work but ultimately there is no substitute for consideration and looking – and being repeatedly told that you can meaningfully apprehend painting by reading more is like being told that you can learn to swim, if you’d just read the manual. 

Music, by virtue of its duration, invites at least some pause – from the three-minute pop-song to a full symphony – time is a pre-condition for engaging with music… unless you constantly skip to the next track – I blame Spotify and “playlists” in general. Were people inclined to spend the average length of a Ramones song looking at a painting they would most likely be found out for the impatient consumers they have lamentably become. Contemporary dance gives me ADHD so clearly none of us are perfect. 

So, when faced with a recalcitrant viewer, or one that simply seeks the easy reinforcement that description offers, I often resort to music as analogy. We can talk about tone, intensity, crescendos, spaces, texture, staccato, lyricism and heaven help us, mood… even emotion and as an enthusiastic agent of the plastic arts, giving people a way in, allowing them the opportunity to see something unexpected feels like a worthy goal and if this can be done without resorting to parables then hallelujah. 

Of course, some painting lends itself more seamlessly to these helpful analogies – hence “Plastic Soul”. And rather than the derisive connotations the term had when first coined to describe David Bowie’s flirtation with Detroit’s other great manufacture, I love it. Daffy as it may sound, these works all have ‘soul’ – that all too elusive quality that separates pretension from authenticity. 

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Mark Twain 

Vision is not a stable proposition. It is restless – even erratic and mostly utterly unreliable. The fact that is not fixed suits Robert Malherbe down to the ground. 

Robert’s approach to what he sees – and it is mostly directly in front of him, either in the studio or plein air, is not to chase the dull accuracy of depiction, rather it is his desire to snare a volatile moment and trap the essence of that vision’s risky transience that simultaneously disrupts and shapes our feelings as much as our seeing. 

Nude, Still Life or Landscape – he seems ecumenical in his chosen subject and it is not because the decision about what to paint is democratic, it is just that each genre provides him with a different compositional architecture and with that a new structure for vision. Whether close scrutiny or a distant view, a soft petal or delicate fold, a flickering reflection or a brooding sky, a cresting wave or the sinewy sweep of a hip for that matter, all give him the happy excuse to take a fully loaded brush on a swift joyous journey.

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Harold Rosenberg

Rosenberg’s view of the act of painting as an act of liberation, albeit one brimming with existentialist and psychological implications, feels like a position that Delaere might be happily resuscitating. Rosenberg’s rival, Clement Greenberg, advocated a fundamentalism that didn’t leave much room for meaning and content and forceful painting like Delaere’s (and ironically Pollock’s for that matter), would never concede to such formalist puritanism.

I very much view Delaere’s painting as being aligned to his engagement with life – with music in particular, though the painting is not limited in it’s wider metaphorical reach. The deliberate way that he builds a densely layered field as a kind of geological stratum –  one that he then reveals in a series of volatile tectonic actions gives these paintings a character that rests on a flamboyant resolution of duality. The polarities of north/south, push/pull, thick/thin, ascension/fall all cohere around the painting’s central vertical axis and yet these works are made flat to the floor where gravity itself is less dictatorial.

This will be the second solo exhibition of Koen Delaere’s paintings at Fox Jensen McCrory and we are delighted to say that he will once again be present.

Thrillingly his work will also be seen in the new Sydney space (soon) as part of the opening exhibition, Plastic Soul… stay tuned.

The post KOEN DELAERE WHITE NOISE RAINBOW first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow

Leonardo Da Vinci

Shadowlands places the sculptures of Sofie Muller amidst the paintings of Hanns Kunitzberger. Both artists embrace a corporeal symbolism in their work, that as Leonardo declared, rests on a bargain between light and darkness, a transaction made so that shadow might reveal form. 

Muller’s commitment to the body, her open endorsement of its inherent fragility is evidence of her awareness of the fugitive, albeit cyclical nature of our existence. Her favoured material, alabaster, is itself a more vulnerable, ‘human’ stone that she carefully selects and sculpts with tenderness and reverence – as if indeed, it were flesh. 

In In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichir? Tanizaki himself quotes architect Louis Kahn “the sun never knew how wonderful it was, until it fell on the wall of a building,” This cimmerian space between light and dark seems to be the place that Muller and her exquisite sculptures most frequently occupy – and certainly the sculptures direct engagement with the wall allows them to perform the same magic that Kahn alludes to – to cast shadowplay.

In the same way that Peter Pan sought desperately to recapture his shadow, even going as far as to have Wendy sew it back on, Tanizaki and Muller acknowledge that a life lived without shadows is a life without dimension, without history. And it is history that Muller’s sculpture both speak to and share in. Her material, her analogue facility, her vision are all sustained by a deep awareness of history… and yet they simultaneously escape it, or rather it’s potential restraints.

The corporeal evidence of Muller’s sculptures is inverted in Kunitzberger’s paintings. The transaction between form and shadow becomes one between viewer and painting as the body exists ‘in absentia”.

Kunitzberger’s decisions about scale and proportion are perhaps decisions about portraiture – be they head and shoulders or full body. The intimacy of his delicate surfaces means that we apprehend the paintings most dramatically at close quarters – at arms length. At this distance they become our shadowplay.

Light enters Kunitzberger’s paintings from the flanks, retreating into the interior shroud of pigment – then remerges on the other side, as if it were a cycle of night and day. This notion of the cycle in Kunitzberger’s works has been celebrated at his magnificent exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle where a grand cycle of sixteen paintings Abbild (Likeness)2002–2005, filled the domed Kuppelsaal. In this sense all Kunitzberger’s paintings are a mediation on time and its ceaseless, elliptical nature… which is just one reason why the installation in Hamburg was so perfect. 

Presently Sofie Muller is exhibiting The Clean Room at the Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent. This commanding and challenging installation was first presented as a thematic Pavilion at the inaugural Malta Biennale 2024, where it was awarded the Best Pavilion.

Fox Jensen McCrory & Fox Jensen are honoured to present the work of these two extraordinary artists together. Though they were both included in our Tokyo presentation of Portrait Without a Face, we have long wanted the opportunity make a more substantial exhibition of works that converse so deeply.

The post SHADOWLANDS MULLER/KUNITZBERGER first appeared on Fox Jensen Gallery.

Varda’s statement demonstrates the illusory, even hallucinatory distinctions between our inner and outer worlds. Her poignant metaphor certainly speaks to the importance of memory and story-telling in human existence. It is a more common convention to suggest that all paintings are a version of self-portraiture but this is an overly reductive notion, one often trotted out as a convenient justification for a conspicuous lack of content, let alone subject.
 
When I spend time with Liat Yossifor’s paintings I am struck by how apt Varda’s ‘blue-sky’ analogy feels, but perhaps more correctly, its inversion – that were we to dig further into the ravines and gullies of Yossifor’s topographical landscapes that we’d find her. 

Of course, what we find is so much more because what Yossifor achieves manages to be both deeply personal but is also a performance, largely without ego. Hers are not showy gestures – legible autographs – rather they exist as evidence of secret excavations made largely in the name of others.

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Obviously, colour is the shared creed amongst these works even if each artist operates from differing belief systems. With each artist embracing, utilising and celebrating colour differently, each delivers highly divergent impacts. From the elegant, prismatic vibrato of Mark Francis to the wild, pink assault of Jan Albers, to the quieter material symbolism of Jane Bustin… each of these artists acknowledge colours capacity to inflame, to calm, to beguile but they also understand its role in constructing the fundamental architecture of sight.

Joining Albers, Culbert and Nikolic’s colours are positively incandescent – Hunter’s and Vary’s swirling expressionist gesture are fuelled by colour, whereas Gerold Miller’s exquisitely honed reliefs unburden colour from any demonstrative obligation. On first sighting, Shila Khatami eschews colour but of course she gives us the polarities between which the full spectrum exists.

Fox Jensen McCrory is delighted to present Farben (IV) which includes works by Jan Albers, Shila Khatami, Elisabeth Vary, Mark Francis, Jane Bustin, Tomislav Nikolic, Gerold Miller, Bill Culbert & Todd Hunter. 

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