ART NEWS: May 03

Highlighting cultures and languages that have a close affinity with the landscapes of Scotland, “A Fragile Correspondence” explores alternative perspectives and new approaches to the challenges of the worldwide climate emergency. Taking inspiration from “The Laboratory of the Future” theme of La Biennale Architettura, writers, artists and architects, in correspondence with landscapes, explore issues distinctly rooted in place but with global relevance to the cultural, ecological and climatic issues that we face. From the forests around Loch Ness, the seashore of the Orkney archipelago, and the industrialised remnants of the Ravenscraig steelworks, the project takes us on a journey through three Scottish landscapes across the Highlands, Islands and Lowlands. In Loch Ness with the Highlands as the genesis for modern, romanticised world tourism, the exhibition explores how internationalised capital and commercial extraction affects the biodiversity, cultural identity and environmental sustainability of the land in a local context. In Orkney the work examines how the local population have for centuries negotiated the forces of nature, in particular the dynamic and powerful sea, as an example of an evolving relationship between people and place anchored in a deep understanding of the natural environment and steeped in community resilience. At Ravenscraig, the exhibition presents the contemporary landscape, often unseen as a moment between somewhere and nowhere, as a place of authenticity and a resurgent natural landscape. Info: Curator: Architecture Fringe, ism, and /other, Docks Cantieri Cucchini, S. Pietro di Castello 40, Venice, Italy, Duration: 20/5-26/11/2023, www.scotlandandvenice.com/

Charles Avery’s exhibition “The Nothing of the Day” begins with a work in the form of a poem, presented in the gallery’s window space. In short, oblique vignettes, the narrator describes a series of events taking place on the Island over the course of a single day, which are also detailed in the six paintings (Avery prefers the term ‘pictures’) that hang in the gallery’s interior, alongside numerous poster designs promoting aspects of the Island’s culture, and a large sculpture featuring containers of blown glass eels and other, more exotic creatures, whose gleaming bodies feel somehow realer than real. The sense of temporal continuity evoked in the poem appears to be a new departure for the artist. Hasn’t he long maintained that the Island is a place that operates outside of time as we commonly understand it? That events, here, may be spatially remote, but do not exist in a chronology? Now, it seems that something like history is being made. Or maybe not. Perhaps the old woman in blue — entering stage right, exiting stage left — is an eternal harbinger, perpetually ushering in an apocalypse until her hour comes round at last. Info: Grimm Gallery, 2 Bourdon Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 25/5-8/7/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com/

Ron Jude’s “12 Hz” is an exhibition of large-scale black-and-white photographs that defy customary expectations of landscape imagery, revealing the planet’s raw materials and the often-imperceptible forces that shape its appearance. In twenty photographs depicting glacial formations, lava flows, tectonic patterns, and tidal currents, Oregon-based photographer Ron Jude (b. 1965) reminds us that geological phenomena operate indifferently to our presence, even in the face of an ecological crisis. The images, stripped bare of evidence of human existence, challenge the myth of human centrality. Neither sentimental, nor moralistic, nor explicitly political, the body of work is a potent visual statement that may offer some solace in documenting the persistence of the physical world. The exhibition’s title, 12 Hz (referencing the lowest threshold of human hearing) alludes to the limits of perception as well as the powerful yet often undetectable forces that shape the physical world. Naming photographs after an invisible sonic property may seem counterintuitive, but just as we might strain to isolate a nearly undetectable tone, Jude’s images challenge us to consider other scales of time, motion, and light that exist at the boundaries of our awareness. Info: Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, USA, Duration: 26/5-13/8/2023, Days & Hours: Mon & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sun 13:00-17:30, https://fristartmuseum.org/

An unprecedented exhibition dedicated to Pierre Jahan, entitled “La Fantaisie surréaliste”, reveals a new facet of the work of the humanist photographer in the immediate post-war period, through a selection of monotypes, photo-collages and works on canvas and paper. While the retrospectives at the Musée Réattu in Arles (2010) and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis (2014-2015) ensured Jahan’s posterity, this exhibition is the very first entirely devoted to his work. surrealism of this versatile and poetic artist. Through a selection of photomontages, photo-collages, rayograms and even paintings (in which he signed La Noiraie, the artist’s alter ego), the exhibition shows the surreal and playful side of Pierre Jahan. This vast corpus of re-composite images, through collage, superimposition and montage, favors both dramatic statements and comical games. Jahan diverts the images of everyday life towards the imaginary, highlighting all their marvelousness. Info: Galerie Jean-François Cazeau, 8rue Sainte-Anastase, Paris, France, Duration: 27/5-27/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.galeriejfcazeau.com/

The works in Florence Peak’s exhibition “Enactment” build on the artist’s performance “Factual Actual” (National Gallery, 2021), which looked at the idea of the collapse of the canon of the classical white Western painting tradition. As by-products of a live moment, they redefine what performance can be and allow past iterations to take on a new life. A set of postcard-sized works on holographic paper made from photographic documentation of the live work incorporates the stillness of classical compositions. Two gaunt, angular plaster sculptures reclining in a classical repose ironically comment on the rounded perfection of renaissance nudes, as they lay on top of what the artist calls ‘Medallions’ – paintings cut out from the canvas stretchers that externalise how grief coagulates within our bodies, in lumps as condescended matter. Two interactive, deeply folded canvases expand into space, becoming sculptural installations that offer a visual counterpoint to the richly draped velvets and brocades of historical paintings. Info:  Richard Saltoun Gallery, 41 Dover Street, London , United Kingdom, Duration: 30/5-8/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, htwww.richardsaltoun.com/

Terrell James is an established artist producing both intimate canvases and vigorous mural-scale works in oil. Entitled “Trust” her new body of work marks a development in James’ practice, with a more graphic linear approach than previous works. Her paintings are interpretations of landscapes, internal and external. The organic shapes of her works allude directly to their origins in plants, animals, fossils and glaciers, but are also referenced in some of her titles; ‘Cleft’, ‘Isla’ and ‘Shell Scented’. James’ expressions of her ‘familiar obsessions’ flow automatically and intuitively from the subconscious as her works unfold. Other works only resolve once completed, evoking a sense of place not intentionally designed but introduced by subconscious memory and found through interaction with the viewer. All of these paintings draw on her wealth of reference points in nature and personal experience but also in art and poetry. As an abstract female artist working in Texas since the late 1970s, Terrell has forged a distinctive style and challenged her practice in the face of adversity. James has continuously sought unfamiliar environments in which to paint. Info: Cadogan Gallery, 87 Old Brompton Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 31/5-23/6/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cadogangallery.com/

For more than thirty years, the French photographer Jean-Luc Mylayne has practiced an unusual form of plein air creativity, working outside, on-site with a large format camera to capture birds in their habitats, exploring how humans and technology have changed the natural world Poetry and existential philosophical questions define Jean-Luc Mylayne’s conceptual photographic practice of over four decades. Sprüth Magers present “Mirror”, a choreographed selection of Mylayne’s works forming a distinctive ensemble thematically revolving around the fragility of our shared ecosystems and the brevity of life on earth. Every work on show is unique and the product of exceptional amounts of commitment, time and technical ingenuity. Requiring lengthy periods of preparation that stand in stark contrast to his subjects’ ceaseless anxious movement, Mylayne composes tableaux that possess the astounding ability to decelerate time. In a meditation on nature, life and transience, he seems to explore the commonalities and divides between us humans and these fragile, untamed animals. Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 2/6-29/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com/

The Shoah Memorial invites Melik Ohanian to invest the space with a selection of works brought for the first time together into a new dialogue, evoking the history of the Armenian genocide. Three major installations will be presented in the crypt: “Concrete Tears” redesigned for the exhibition, the work is a mixture of cement and resin, 3451 “concrete tears”, like the number of kilometers separating Paris from Yerevan in Armenia, are suspended by steel wires. This work has been redesigned especially for the exhibition, “Streetlights of Memory” a new evocation of the “Reverberations of Memory”, and “Pulp Off” which questions the meaning and power of text and its destruction. Alongside those works, a video will be projected on the facade of the Memorial and the documentary “MEMORY” will be presented by the artist for the first time at the Auditorium, as part of the 2023 edition of the Nuit Blanche. Info: Shoah Memorial, 17 Rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, Paris, France, Duration: 3-25/6/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, https://billetterie.memorialdelashoah.org/