NEW YORK, NY.- Co(r)respondences: Constructive Affinities/Painting as Surface is the second iteration of a curatorial idea driving group shows organized by structural affinities rather than art historical links. In this occasion works by artists represented by Nara Roesler Gallery are installed in dialogue vis-à-vis works by significant international artists, following two complementary aspects: the primacy of constructive-driven compositions, and painting as a singular understanding of surface.
Modern painting might have seen the light following the famous assertion by Maurice Denis, at the end of the Nineteenth Century: “It should be remembered that a painting, before being a warhorse, a nude or a story, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.” And yet, for as much that art historians, artists and critics have tried to summarize (modern) art under a unique category, it has not stopped taking endless multiform appearances.
When one considers the relation between construction and surface, it is thus possible to draw a vast field of potentialities for art. Two radical polarities, two different categories serve to manifest a field of constant action and agency: on one hand constructive three-dimensionality, on the other hand flat, almost emptied surfaces. In their inexhaustible intervals, formal and historically, the possibilities are countless, infinite in-between these continents. Construction is volume, void, articulation, insertion, cut; surface is subjectile, support, background, ground. And yet construction and surface can transform into each other, as painting is construction on surface, whereas construction could be a path beyond painting, a de/ construction of surfaces.
The show is therefore displayed dialectically, but it aims to stress that art is a single, continuous field of differences where potential affinities unexpectedly rise, beyond contexts and chronologies. The relevance and meaning of works of art do not rest on their uniqueness, rather they only manifest into the degree that the relational interval between their differences is uncovered, displayed, interpreted. It is in its comparative instance that art makes sense, and through which works of art never cease achieving their meaning, beyond the intentional program from which they proceed, beyond the single individual decision that produced them.
Co(r)respondences: Constructive Affinities/Painting as Surface proposes a set of groupings between various artists, following diverse analogical rationale: constructive assemblage investing their site (Bruno Munari, Elaine Reichek, Lucia Koch, Lydia Okumura); serial and continuous composition of elemental forms (Bruno Munari, Tomie Ohtake, Abraham Palatnik); folding surfaces as agencies of spatial displacement and time elapsed (Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Bunga); all-over repetition between order and chaos (Antonio Dias, Chris Martin, Bruno Dunley); gestural surfaces (Karin Lambrecht, Cristina Canale, Mira Schendel).
Co(r)respondences draws its curatorial impulsion from anthropology rather than art history: it understands art as a politics of multiplicities, against the ghost of unification and synthesis, against the dominant One in which everything subsumes. Through the collision of contexts, it aims to suggest that art can be universal only to the condition that its universality is the ceaseless agency of its variation.
