Please join us at HarlemStudioFellowship by Montrasioarte for the upcoming exhibition,
S c a f f o l d i n g s
featuring works by:
Mariagrazia Pontorno & Tamas Jovanovics
Curated by Raffaele Bedarida
Opening reception: Thursday, April 23, 2009 – 6.00 PM – 10.30 PMBy appointment: April 24 – May 4
Italian artist Mariagrazia Pontorno exhibits two works linked to each other and both entitled Roots. Her series of digital images adopt the iconography of traditional herbaria. Eight species of plants and flowers that grow and blossom in Central Park during the months of Pontorno’s residency in Manhattan, are painstakingly reconstructed in exceptionally precise 3D pictures (with the technical support of Alessandro Lupo and Francesco Palenga). Only at a closer analysis the viewer feels uncomfortable: the tension between naturalness and artificiality emerges slowly and uncannily from those plants. Printed and traditionally framed, the synthetic herbarium further resounds in the early-1900s environment of HSF’s townhouse. Pontorno’s second work is a storyboard, the project for a visionary video animation: the plants of the herbarium are now in Central Park’s Great Lawn. Touched by the wind, they emerge form the ground and levitate. In the background, the skyscrapers takeoff as space shuttles, showing their eradicated roots.
London-based, Hungarian artist Tamas Jovanovics exhibits Horizontal Straight Lines: a series of paintings exclusively consisting of horizontal straight lines (thousands of them) on square-shaped canvases. Combined in triptychs, the canvases are hung at 45 degrees, and the colored-pencil lines dash through the lozenges. The optical result on the canvas’ surface is that of a pulsing vibration, a centrifugal tendency (Rosalind Krauss), described by Jovanovics in terms of evasiveness. Beyond the canvases’ limits, the effect is that of an infinite continuity: the lozenges are “just” the visible terminals of the lines’ virtual limitlessness. An homage to Piet Mondrian’s New York work, Horizontal Straight Lines engage a dialogue with Manhattan: their infinite horizontality is playfully dialectical with the most vertical of all the cities.
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