The Latin origins of the word monster, monere/monstrum, mean to portend and instruct. A monster’s instructive function is abundant within the span of Western mythos: do not be, do, go near, or engage. Interaction with this other is a form of becoming.
The portraits created by Cayce Zavaglia are not meant to flatter. There is no idealization, only relentless recording of physiognomic traits. There is nowhere to hide from her methodical analysis of every form and tonality.
The art of Aron Wiesenfeld has a particular and peculiar relationship to the microscope. The visual field of his images, sometimes given from an ariel perspective (the all-seeing eye/the third-person omniscient), allows the removed observer to glimpse a hermetic totality vibrating with atmosphere, energy, myth, temporality, the suburban familiar, and many liminal transitions, e.g. nature and architecture, night and day, mystery and commonplace, magic and realism.
Jane LaFarge Hamill and I met when I invited her to participate in a curation project at the now liquidated Lounge Underground Artist Collective. I distinctly remember unwrapping the first of two small paintings she delivered to the space; I was taken back in the revelation of the image.
Aficionado of the esoteric and champion of the outsider art aesthetic, Stephen Romano has reopened his gallery in Bushwick with an invitation to those of curious mind to peruse and ponder.
When graffiti and street art leave the urban jungle, what do they become? The elements that define the genre—spray paint drips, high-chroma colors, calligraphic lines and tagging—have become commonplace and appropriated much like the fashion world’s adoption of punk.
Rob Plater is an exceptionally gifted draftsman and artist. Growing up in Brooklyn, he was educated through comics and graphic novels, mastering stylistic variation, anatomical proportion, perspective, and dimensional geometric thinking well before beginning his formal education.
Holly Ann Scoggins is a figurative painter and professor at Polk State College in Florida. The viewer’s of her art peer through lattices of patterned textiles on the picture plane’s surface (like vines and underbrush in a dense forest) that tangle, reveal or obfuscate female portraiture and rural narratives set in the American South.
Francesc Ruiz Abad is a conceptual artist living and working in Barcelona. Ruiz Abad creates through a wide range of media allowing project to determine method. His works are ambitious, multi-faceted expressions inspired by the phenomenological minutia and narrative of daily life.
For the first time Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense Fiquet (including the smaller intimate domestic sketches) are brought together in a blindingly beautiful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
