Felice Varini

Felice Varini's work is completely insane. He works and plays with perspectives and paints lines or geometrical forms in open spaces. You have to stand at the exact good point of view to get his whole picture. Or else, what you will see will be just chaos. Sometimes it is hard to believe the pictures are real and were not digitally remastered!!! This is what Varini says of his work :

«My field of action is architectural space and everything that constitutes such space These spaces are and remain the original media for my painting. I work "on site" each time in a different space and my work develops itself in relation to the spaces I encounter.

I generally roam through the space noting its architecture, materials, history and function. From these spatial data and in reference to the last piece I produced, I designate a specific vantage point for viewing from which my intervention takes shape.

The vantage point is carefully chosen: it is generally situated at my eye level and located preferably along an inevitable route, for instance an aperture between one room and another, a landing... I do not, however, make a rule out of this, for all spaces do not systematically possess an evident line.

It is often an arbitrary choice. The vantage point will function as a reading point, that is to say, as a potential starting point to approaching painting and space.

The painted form achieves its coherence when the viewer stands at the vantage point.When he moves out of it, the work meets with space generating infinite vantage points on the form. It is not therefore through this original vantage point that I see the work achieved; it takes place in the set of vantage points the viewer can have on it.

If I establish a particular relation to architectural features that influence the installation shape, my work still preserves its independence whatever architectural spaces I encounter. I start from an actual situation to construct my painting. Reality is never altered, erased or modified, it interests and seduces me in all its complexity. I work "here and now".»

+Felice Varini

+Via Design Crisis

James Rieck

James Rieck does series of close up oil paintings: legs, hands, fabric, girls in underwear, and lately swim caps. Very detailed work, photo realistic, he drives our attention on certain details and forces us to focus and look on certain things maybe we wouldn't have focused on in the first place.

James Rieck was born in Pittsburg in 1966.

+James Rieck

Yo Yo Xiao

Using digital technology, Yo Yo Xiao constructed a three-dimensional image by applying many successive mutations in order to examine the emotional reactions of humans toward illusion. Starting with a single still photograph, he initiated a sequence of continuous and unstable calculations which triggered spontaneous distortions and modifications of the image. The irregular rearrangement and constant restructuring induced an atmosphere of illusion. This is intended to elicit unpredictable and incredible thoughts from the viewer.

+Crossing Art

Sophie Calle

These are pictures from Sophie Calle's project Take Care of Yourself she thought of after receiving a breakup letter with these words written in it. This is how she explains it :

«I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, Take care of yourself.
I followed this advice to the letter
I asked 107 women (as well as two handpuppets and a parrot), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret the letter.
To analyse it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it.
Understand it for me. Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up
A way to take care of myself. »

The Galerie Perrotin presents some clips of these videos (click on one of the pictures of women holding a letter and a pop up window will open. There, you will have access to these clips. Just so you know, not every picture presents a clip...).



+Sophie Calle @ Galerie Perrotin
+Sophie Calle @ the Guardian

Joyce Korotkin

Eli Sudbrack (assume vivid astro focus, AVAF) • Artist


Lawrence Rinder • Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY


Lilli Wei • Critic


Ron Warren • Director, Mary Boone Gallery, NY


Todd Hutcheson • Private Art Dealer, Consultant


Micaela Giovannotti • US Editor, Tema Celeste Contemporary Art


Barbara London • Curator, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NY

Joyce Korotkin's series Synergistic Adversaries are life-sized portraits of art world characters, from emerging to established, that document a cross-section of the New York art world in the dawn of the 21st century. Included are artists, dealers, museum directors, curators, collectors and critics — from those who create art to those who promote, sell, support, document and ultimately preserve it — all of whom are of equal importance within the synergistic but highly competitive circle of the art world. Comprised of individual portraits, each originated from life sittings, the series as a whole is a portrait of the era. Like a time capsule, it resonates with an essence of the moment right now, but will, as careers evolve and time passes, become redolent with the scent of art history.

+Joyce Korotkin

Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised in Florida in an upper-middle-class household. As an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Minter took photographs of her mother that drew the attention of visiting instructor Diane Arbus.

Minter moved to New York City in 1976, after earning a master of fine arts degree at Syracuse University. She became involved in the nightclub scene in Manhattan of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She also taught in a Catholic boys' school. In 1985 she began working in art again.

Her photographs and works often include sexuality and erotic imagery. Her method of painting involves many coatings of translucent enamel paint on metal to produce a luminous, almost hallucinatory finish. Her photographs are all taken in order to create a painting, yet sometimes she uses the photograph as is, without converting it. She does not use a graphic-editing program on her images, nor does she crop them, but rather uses different aspects of the image to create the painting.

“ I think that whenever you make something that looks good, people want to underestimate it. They immediately want to dismiss it. If it looks really good, there’s an automatic rejection. But it doesn’t really matter, because I know that these paintings are going to look good in 20 or 30 or 50 years. So if people don’t get it now, they’re going to get it sooner or later. ” (Wikipedia)



+Artnet
+Salon 94

Matthew Barney

I am not certain that I understand the world and depths of Matthew Barney, as it is very enigmatic. But my curiosity is vivid and I am working my way through this environment that feels devilish, provocative, fascinating and very intriguing.

Matthew Barney is an American artist. He was born March 25, 1967, in San Francisco, California. Over the past two decades Matthew Barney has created a distinctive universe using a multitude of media, from sculpture and photography to drawing and film. Informed by a careful study of art history, cultural production, the human body, and biological development, his work reveals a keen interest in process and the evolution of form.

Barney's epic Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) is a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation. Barney’s long-time collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the films’ soundtracks. The cycle unfolds not just cinematically, but also through the photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produces in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli. The project is rife with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated. The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown—in Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology. The photographs, drawings, and sculptures radiate outward from the narrative core of each film installment. Barney's photographs—framed in plastic and often arranged in diptychs and triptychs that distill moments from the plot—often emulate classical portraiture. His graphite and petroleum jelly drawings represent key aspects of the project's conceptual framework.(Wikipedia)

+Matthew Barney

Jean-Luc Mylayne

Since 1976 Jean-Luc Mylayne has led a nomadic life, travelling for weeks and months on end in search of his photographic subjects - ordinary1 commonplace birds such as robins or sparrows and their avian relations.

Although Mylayne has, by necessity, a deep knowledge of ornithology his work bears little relation to the images of wildlife photographers. He does not pursue his prey with a telephoto lens, and is not searching for the exotic or the unusual.

Mylayne has produced fewer than 150 photographs during his life. Unsurprising given that each image, although recorded in a split second, in fact embodies months and months sometimes years - of patient work, watching and waiting, because artist and bird have to be intimately acquainted before the portrait can be captured.

Mylayne describes the bird as the "actor" to his "director'. And like a film director, every aspect of the scene has been carefully designed beforehand in his mind - the quality of light (often artificial), the time of day, the season, the composition of the landscape elements - leaving only the bird's presence to complete the picture. As the bird flies into the frame to assume its designated position, the shutter clicks, and the photograph - perhaps a year after conception-is finally finished.

The intense proximity of the artist to his subjects is clear when, in some photographs, you catch his image reflected back in the bird's eye. At other times, the bird is partially obscured by foliage, or caught in mid-flight, or tiny within the frame, so that you struggle to find it hidden within its natural habitat.

At heart, Jean-Luc Mylayne's is a conceptual art which addresses the philosophical and experiential phenomenon of time, as expressed in his absolute absorption with the details of nature. Mylayne's photography is about the quiet "discipline of experiencing the intervals" in contrast to the decisive moments so traditional to the photographic medium.(Artmag)

+Gladstone Gallery
+Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion