Sarah de Teliga At Home: Crushed Cans, Painted Chops & Vibrating Landscapes

SARAH DE TELIGA AT HOME IN HER PARIS STUDIO.

Painting has never been the simple application of color on surface in order to reproduce reality – objective or not. Any successful painter has rendered reality in a way that endures beyond its own time. And in that process lies the poetic struggle of vision and the talent to pull it off, the result of which is a signature, the hard fought engraved reason for living an aesthetic life in a world overrun with quite a few ugly things.

"Landscape is a vehicle to coax us into a transcendental state," de Sarah de Teliga tells me, implying that a transcendental state is a goal, and a temporary one at that.

The expatriate Australian living in Paris expresses that goal that in pretty much every stroke of paint on her varied surfaces. As she prepares for an exhibition at Damien Minton Gallery in Sydney, finishing up some 20 small landscapes on board, 25 paintings on found crushed cans, and six small "pill" pieces on scraps of metal, I had the opportunity to meet with her and talk about what painting is, can be and the effort to get beyond reality to arrive at a nearer truth – in paint.

Store Front Windows: As your show At Home in at Damien Minton Gallery Australia readies to open and you prepare for the trip, what sorts of aesthetic thinking will you be bringing from Paris with you?

Sarah de Teliga: These past few years I saw and drank in an enormous amount of painting particularly Holbein, Memling, David Hockney, and Gauguin – and Gaugin through Peter Doig’s eyes. Gaugin, with the fabulous exhibition at the Tate in London, is an interesting point of departure. He was always trying to create a perfect world in his paintings – trying to remake even 19th and early 20th century Tahiti. When Gaugin arrived there he saw that it was so impure, so Westernized…he immediately set about creating an island dream.  Earlier he went to Brittany and sought out ancient folkloric imagery that no longer existed and tried to recast it through landscapes, nostalgia and paint.

SFW: And what is that for you…as a painter working at the onset of the 21st century?

SdT: I accept the ongoing contamination of culture… But my beautiful trees in a forest come with a fence and a rubbish bin. I see the constraints of nature, and part of what I do is show we no longer have a pure natural state, but only an aesthetic state.  I've always included those elements of modernity into the landscape; in nature – when we immerse ourselves – I think we are sidestepping the venal aspects of the world.  I'm in a cage trying to create a world with massive landscapes in it. I know it's a fiction, but a desire nonetheless.

SFW: In your show at Damien Minton, we see landscapes and seascapes from France and England, mountains and seasides. Where's "At Home" for you?

SdT: Home is somewhere I put my mind, where I can paint until the temporal details fade and delicate poetry emerge and where I can focus, meditate, worship. I wonder, is it a form of animism? It can be rock pools in Sydney, megaliths (standing stones) in Cumbria, England, or along the Mediterranean coast in France. All of those outdoor spaces – the sea, the mountains, the forests – connect with me as a child, from my early life in Australia. 

For instance, when the first painters came to Australia, they continued to paint that country side as if it were a European landscape. In a way, I'm always looking for the eucalyptus!  In the process, I find that I can swim out as far as I like and won't be taken by a shark. But there's always a shark lurking. Key the music for "Jaws!"   

SFW: In this exhibition you've put together an incredible series of works on flattened, rusted cans and tins… There are "chops" and "landscapes" and "megaliths" and "madonnas" and "animals." They are so unusual and strange. What is the genesis of this series?

SdT: The crushed can series perhaps grow from my interest in  artists such as  Rauschenberg, using the found, used. An object with a long but contemporary history imprinted in them – their sophisticated engineering, their printing, the finest our culture produces then promptly discards. That they are found and abused reflects back on the culture we live in… "throw away." My pleasure is to place something timeless on them – a landscape or a woman in a burqa or an animal that is so far from the idea of garbage. I have to admit, I love the surfaces and the scale and the limitations; you can only do so much on these pieces. They have to be clear.  Using that surface, I allow the subject matter to generate new and different meanings. The iron age megaliths like Io Pan, which shows a number of wind generators behind the large  standing rock, is like a message in a bottle… but rather a can. I found this on my street run over a thousand times by trucks and buses and cars. There's also a link back to painters who worked on cigar boxes, that impoverished supports, a kind of arte povera of my own.

SFW: The pieces with the women in burqas are unusual, and my guess, political…

SdT: The paintings of women in burqas are both on Coke cans.  Given the animosity between the two prevailing Western and Middle Eastern cultures, it seemed that the corporate giant – Coca-Cola – is a logical support for this kind of work.  I understand there is even a competing cola brand out of the Middle East – Mecca Cola.  But I don't think they make cans… if they did, perhaps I'd paint an American serviceman or  make a reference to the poverty-stricken sharecroppers in 1930s on one. That would be fair, don't you think? But it's not judging so much as posing questions.

SFW: And the chops?

SdT: Meat is such a rich and delicious subject.  In Australian culture the barbecue and the chop is kind of an icon, a sign of abundance, fun.  My husband bought a pair of chops for me to work with here in Paris as models, then we ate the still life!  All one has to do is look back at 500 years of still life painting - Rembrandt, Chardin, Soutine, Francis Bacon – and we find a compelling narrative of our own history.  Painting raw meat is a great sensual pleasure.

SFW: Your landscapes on boards are so different from these pieces on twisted and crushed metal, how do they relate?

SdT: The landscapes are always plein air, they are real places that alter as I work, as thoughts drip into the landscape unbidden.  Technically, they are more demanding  I find myself reaching towards a brand of realism, but not so much that they are closed spaces. I think people project themselves into these spaces – even though they are quite small – whether it's a seaside or mountain range or forest.  For example, one of the Mediterranean series with its rock formations had one psychiatrist friend of mine telling me she saw legs and arms, a "muscular sensuality" in them. They are windows onto the “marvelous.”  In making them I hope for a certain percentage of the actual landscape filtering back into the work without my control,  becoming a distillation of my own aspirations and psychological moods and nourishing beauty of the natural world. The image has an ability to hold memory in layers, like a piece of amber; my thoughts are something like insects embedded within. The landscapes become symbolic echoes of the spiritual world, feeble little attempts using the certainty of paint to illuminate the spirit. Adjusting the temperature of the natural world to nuances of my feelings.

SFW: Have you always made landscapes?

SdT: Yes, for decades. The first few years after art school I produced interior landscapes, but always with a window. I painted chairs, radiators, and objects we often look at but ignore – cables, electrical outlets, the backs of televisions. Slowly I looked more and more out the window. When I lived opposite the Cimetière du Montparnasse I produced landscapes looking out the window. Then, over the past few years I just walked into these spaces and painted everything around me. There is a spiritual aspect to them, but the smallness of these pieces also makes them objects, totems, ex-votos. They are worldly links to dreams, to love and belief.

SFW: You have an obsession with detail.  I'm looking at some of the newer can pieces, the still-lifes, they seem to be details of draperies, a nod to Cézanne?

SdT: Well in fact there are a few pieces that salute Cézanne, like the paint can top of draperies.  Here in France for some reason my attention is drawn to the folds of fabric, the chips in walls, the miniature parks between the pavement cracks, the patterns in the gutter of cigarette butts outside a school, details in paintings, all sorts of things that we need to overlook.  Adding something of value – a detail of an elegant life – to stuff in the gutter, becomes a time capsule.  I'm doubling up the time capsule with references.  In a way, because I live in Paris, maybe it's how I see the French seeing themselves.  In a fin de siècle dream, they seem to admire a reality that is quite different from the actual– trash in the gutter.  There's a gorgeous irony to that.

Sarah de Teliga : At Home Ici Bas
Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Opening: November 30, 2010.  Thru: December 18, 2010.
http://damienmintongallery.com.au/artists/sarah-de-teliga

Alan Riding: Life in Nazi Occupied Paris

Alan Riding's new book on Paris during the Nazi occupation has just been published.  Riding was European culture correspondent for the New York Times for 12 years; he is based in Paris. His book details the lives and contributions of artists and writers during this critical moment in 20th century history.

Order or read more here.

From the publisher: On June 14, 1940, German tanks rolled into a silent and deserted Paris. Eight days later, a humbled France accepted defeat along with foreign occupation. The only consolation was that, while the swastika now flew over Paris, the City of Light was undamaged. Soon, a peculiar kind of normality returned as theaters, opera houses, movie theaters and nightclubs reopened for business. 

This suited both conquerors and vanquished: the Germans wanted Parisians to be distracted, while the French could show that, culturally at least, they had not been defeated. Over the next four years, the artistic life of Paris flourished with as much verve as in peacetime. Only a handful of writers and intellectuals asked if this was an appropriate response to the horrors of a world war. 

See the book web site for And The Show Went On.

Artists Protest At Ray Johnson & A Book About Death Exhibition On Long Island

Several artists were seen protesting at the recent opening of Ray Johnson & A Book About Death, the most recent in a series of exhibitions on the subject of death at CW Post College on Long Island. 

The protestors, including so-called "collage artist" Honey Millmann, carried signs that said "PROTEST."  When asked what she was protesting, Millmann explained: "NOTHING."  Ray Johnson, the artist who is acknowledged as the "father of mail art," made many "nothings" in the form of drawings, photocopy prints and performances.  He has also a large body of work featuring the word "nothing" backwards: "gnihton."

Later in the evening Honey Millmann switched signs.  This one "ABAD IDEA" uses the acronym for the A Book About Death exhibitions.  Here she is seen with a coffin, reportedly filled with "nothing" specially shipped in for the opening. Millmann works with Viv Maudlin to document exhibitions, as well. Her work can be seen here: ABAD NYC and RJ&ABAD.

The protesters were met with other artists without signs posing as a Madonna and Child.

See more here: http://rayjohnsonandabookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/

Control A Woman : New & Improved

Waiting for the remote for men to come out.  Click image to enlarge (and read the buttons).

Ron English: Camoflage Deer

The brilliant Ron English never sleeps. His participation in Underbelly, a street art project in an abandoned NYC subway station took place when the city that never sleeps took a nap. Click here to see a  Video of the project. Above, his painting Camo Deer.  See more from his Popaganda site.

Visit the Underbelly Project.

The Art Cure: Artist: Matthew Rose (55)

The Art Cure: Artist: Matthew Rose (55): "Contributing artist, Paris France 'Me You' 14 and 3/4 by 18 and 3/4 inches (378mm x 478mm) Handpulled three color silkscreen print dated and signed..."

Obama: Avant Garde Video

Weekly Address: Jobs Creation from White House Weekly Address on Vimeo.

From ART FAG CITY via THE ONION.

Shakespeare & Company

Joanna Walsh, UK-based artist, has been working feverishly for Paris institution Shakespeare & Company, producing posters, murals, inserts and even bags for the famed destination.

Check out Joanna's site, and see more of these wonderful pieces.

Artist Auctioning Off His Control Over His 7-Year Artistic Output on eBay

New York-based artist William Brovelli is selling control over his artistic output for 7 years, in an conceptual piece entitled "Seven Year Itch."  The project begins with an auction bid on his production on eBay.

The artist follows others who have used eBay to stir the art world pot a bit, generate buzz and and perhaps find themselves as endentured servants of the Art Review Power 100 for a period of ... years!  Christophe Büchel famously auctioned off his place at Manifesta several years ago.  Artist Sal Randolf bought the placement and created the Free Manifesta.

Brovelli writes: "This is an interactive piece titled: 'Seven Year Itch' in which I am offering the collector the right to suspend my creative output for a period of 7 years. This act of relinquishing control to the purchaser creates a scenario in which the collector becomes a primary figure in the forming of the history of the piece… as well as letting me off the hook for a while."  

William Brovelli participated in the global project, A Book About Death.  Click here to see his piece.

Bidding on eBay starts at: $1000.

Artist Website: http://www.williambrovelli.com/

JR: Big Photos, 2011 TED Prize Winner

JR is a 27-year old photographer/grafitti artist, or graffeur as he calls it, and his modus operandi is to photograph locals and then print the images large and plaster them just about everywhere, on steps, trains, houses, walls as a kind of homage to the people he admires. His efforts are global and his works appear in cities (and on walls) around the world – from Nairobi to Paris to Cambodia to Palestine. We, at SFW, find this work absolutely gorgeous, amazing and well, just take a look for yourselves...

From the TED.com website: JR exhibits his photographs in the biggest art gallery on the planet. His work is presented freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Action; it talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit.

JR’s career as a photographer began when he found a camera in the Paris subway. In his first major project, in 2001 and 2002, JR toured and photographed street art around Europe, tracking the people who communicate their messages to the world on walls. His first large-format postings began appearing on walls in Paris and Rome in 2003. His first book, Carnet de rue par JR, about street artists, appeared in 2005.

In 2006, he launched “Portrait of a Generation,” huge-format portraits of suburban “thugs” from Paris’ notorious banlieues, posted on the walls of the bourgeois districts of Paris. This illegal project became official when Paris City Hall wrapped its own building in JR’s photos.

In 2007, with business partner Marco, he did “Face 2 Face,” which some consider the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR and a grassroots team of community members posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the security fence/separation barrier.

He embarked on a long international trip in 2008 for his exhibition “Women Are Heroes,” a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. In 2010, the film Women Are Heroes was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and received a long-standing ovation.

JR is currently working on two projects: “Wrinkles of the City,” which questions the memory of a city and its inhabitants; and Unframed, which reinterprets famous photographs and photographers by taking photos from museum archives and exposing them to the world as huge-format photos on the walls of cities. It asks the question: What is the art piece then? The original photo, the photo “unframed” by JR or both?

JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, two important things happen: The images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where new people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience. And ongoing art and craft workshops in the originating community continue the work of celebrating everyone who lives there.

As he is anonymous and doesn’t explain his huge full-frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/ interpreter.
This is what JR is working on. Raising questions…

VISIT THE JR WEBSITE.

TED WEBSITE WITH MORE OF JR'S WORK.

Vingt Paris : Apartments In Paris

Susie Hollands, founder and director of Vignt Paris, has been helping people find apartments in Paris for nearly a dozen years. Vignt recently relaunched her company website with an opening slide show that shows a ton of wonderful Paris images. Need an apartment in Paris for a week, a month, a year? Check it out: http://vingtparis.com/

Photo: The Rue Daguerre, 75014, Paris.

The Art Blog Dot Org

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof founded the Zero .1% for Art Commission to bridge the gap between ordinary people and art. theartblog, established in 2003, is an outgrowth of that mission.

Roberta Fallon makes art, writes about art and thinks about art probably too much. She’s proud to claim part ownership of THEartblog with her dear friend and long-time collaborator, Libby. As a child in Milwaukee Roberta put on puppet shows in the garage and sold popcorn for a penny and realized she loved an audience but had no head for business. Married to Steve and with three children, Oona, Max and Stella, Roberta has written about art for Philadelphia Weekly, Artnet, Art Review, Art on Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer and Art and Auction, and has taught and been a visiting critic at Tyler School of Art, St. Joseph’s University and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Read posts by Roberta»

 

Libby Rosof I credit my husband Murray and kids Alex and Minna for making me take popular culture seriously. As for the art, I gave it up in the 10th grade in Brooklyn. I wouldn’t have spent so many years on art or spent all my time writing artblog if not for my good buddy and long-time collaborator Roberta–it’s all her fault. I founded the award-winning publication the Penn Current at the University of Pennsylvania, and I’ve taught in public school, the Journalism Department at Temple University and at Tyler School of Art. Enough already! Read posts by Libby»

 

Libby and Roberta the Editors, aka liberta, aka Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon started this blog in 2003. Between the two of them they have 3,891 posts to their names as of july 26, 2010. More coming. Read posts by Liberta»

David Shrigley At Frieze London: I'm Dead

Frieze London is a veritable shopping mall this weekend with Ten Embarassed Men wandering the fair in white shirts looking, well embarrased. Perhaps about the shortage of women artists?  Or maybe because they're just men and it's their nature. Performance is by Annika Stroom.

David Shrigley, the irreverent UK scribbler is there making free temporary tattoos for visitors.  Don't wash them off.  Here's his doggy, who by the way, is dead. 

If you're in London Town and you get a chance, there's also Scared But Fresh at The Orange Dot Gallery nearby on 54 Tavistock Place (Tube Russell Square).

Photo: Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

The Art Collectors: Marty Gordon

Marty Gordon loves comics.  He also likes rewriting them. He is one of 40 artists featured in Masters: Collage (Lark Books, 2010). Irreverent, funny, sardonic, Gordon pulls aces out of his deck non-stop.

Image: The Art Collectors, 6" x 8," collage on wood panel.  See more of Marty Gordon's work here.

Exit Through The Cloak Room: British Artist Mike Ballard On Stealing, Art & Redemption

It’s hard to be a bad boy in the art world these days, but Mike Ballard is trying. His installation “Whose Coat Is That Jacket You’re Wearing?” fulfills a contemporary art world wet dream ... Just in time for the Frieze Art Fair in London.  Exit Through The Cloak Room!

Read the whole article from theartblog.org.

Art Grant

Alot of people think this is me!

Fluxmuseum ABAD Opens in Texas

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH THE EXHIBITION ARCHIVE: Fluxmuseum ABAD Opens in Texas.

Ricardo Bloch: Ali Baba's Cave at Galerie Thalie Paris Opening October 21 at 6 PM

Ricardo Bloch launches a new exhibition of his photographs in Paris at Galerie Thalie featuring a sequence of photographs produced in a theater prop store room.  Think: Ali Baba from 1001 Nights.

Opening:  Thursday, October 21, 6-9 pm, Galerie Thalie, 26, rue Robert Fleury, 75015,  (06) 81 45 33 83

Preview here.

See more of Ricardo Bloch's work: http://ricardobloch.com/

Make Your Own Artist Stamps: Michel Hosszù

Michel Hosszù, the French artist known the world over for his stamps – Marquis de Sade, Coluche, Famous People, Warhol, Van Gogh's Self Portraits and thousands of other editions for individual artists – will print your own designs as stamps. Individual stamps, small sheets and large format sheets permit artists to create limited editions of varying kinds.

Michel Hosszù has long practiced mail art with a focus on stamps. Several works from the 1980s feature the red Marianne French postage stamp covering entire canvases. The artist says: "I used to work in a factory where my job was to get rid of mailed envelopes, so I peeled off thousands of these canceled stamps." Other strange and wonderful objects have sailed in and out of his Bastille studio over the decades.

Michel has also helped me produce my limited edition, Rubens Rounding Third, an ode to baseball, art and the sexy gaze of an amorous public and player.

Artists, photographers, designers and others have the opportunity now to produce their own stamps using whatever image and text they desire. Formats vary, so it's best to take a good look at how to organize an edition using these design grids.

Cost is relatively minor compared to the impact of these great little works of art. My guess is they'll also make interesting gifts for people who want to immortalize a friend or a pet or even, hey! an idea on a stamp.

Contact: Michel Hosszù in Paris.

EYEHOLE ART

Eyehole Paintings with Adam West from Adam West

Landscape in America: Howard Rose

Reproducing the landscape on canvas, whether an abandoned beach or a busy city street, a sun-bleached roof or a snow-caked tree, has been the obsessed province of painters since forever.

The great outdoors in America became a high art with the works of the Hudson Valley River painters fueled perhaps by the writings of Henry David Thoreau. In France, Cezanne and Monet, went outdoors and their un-peopled designs of nature crushed in pigment magnified through the prism of the eye changed both the way we see the world and structure of painting itself. In the process of describing the world in paint, the medium itself became a subject: A swath of sunlight rendered in a longish patch of cadmium yellow modified with titanium white.  You could almost eat it. Thick and lustrous, paint depicted the natural world, and the painting itself then became an object for the man-made one.

Howard Rose does just that in his massive catalog of landscape works. Producing larger format and miniature canvases, the Long Island-based artist (and teacher), has mapped out the glowing corners of the soft and worn world around him.

In the last 100 years most every artist beginning at a very young age has painted the tree they first climbed, the house they grew up in, or the horizon that met them as they pondered the damn meaning of it all. The real world – the familiar – is the basis for art: Broken down barns, their colors wilting in the summer sun or brooks eking out a dribble of water under a blanket of snow, or waves transparent and curling, cresting on an empty beach. The impulse to immortalize a flowering meadow, a patch in the woods, a range of mountains, shadows on a footpath is innately human, it's about mixing memory with desire, creating elaborate traces of what we've seen, and what we see.     

Howard Rose is a hunter-gatherer of these five-senses moments. Using photography as a framing device, or sometimes working directly in nature, the artist restates the world in compelling compositions that are solid but dreamy, sensual and sure. 

It's fair to say that Howard Rose is thrilled by light. And he's mastered the various techniques to give light palpable reality on canvas without tilting over into the photo-realist canon. His transparent foam cresting waves breaking on an Atlantic shore are perfect haikus of action: A poetic fusion of Nature's various verbs. Dune grasses, sun dappled paths, clapboard houses wrapped in the blueish haze of afternoon snow are all fascinations for this artist, and each foray into these subjects yields compositions are both examine the texture of the world and ultimately the mind that seizes it.

A graduate of The School of Visual Arts, in New York City, and post-graduate studies at C.W. Post college, Howard Rose also studied  at the New School of Social Research for Photography.

Howard Rose runs a painting workshop and has written extensively on teaching and technique for publications such as Artist's Magazine and American Artist Magazine, and he leads oil painting workshops throughout the Northeast, including The Hudson Valley Workshops, The Art Barge in East Hampton, and Southampton Oil Painting Workshop as well as The Huntington Art League and C.W. Post College.

Photo: Howard Rose and excited guest at his recent one-man show at Chrysalis Gallery in Southampton, New York.

Visit one of his galleries: Les Bons Amis Locust Valley, NY. Or click here to see more of Howard Rose's work.  His work shop is here.

Your Art Here: Spelling With Scissors

I've entered my full on, wall to wall to wall from ceiling to floor installation work Spelling With Scissors in the H&M contest, Your Art Here.  Take a look, vote (click on the stars), and survey the other artist proposals.  If you're an artist, submit your own entry.  It's free.

MATTHEW ROSE Spelling With Scissors: Your Art Here (Vote).

Roy Lichtenstein: Autumn in New York

“Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968” is on view through Jan. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street;(212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.

“Roy Lichtenstein: Mostly Men”  through Oct. 30 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, 18 East 77th Street, Manhattan;(212) 249-4470.

“Roy Lichtenstein Reflected” through Oct. 30 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, Chelsea; (212) 744-7400.

NYT Article by Roberta Smith.

Image above: “Indian” (1951), at the Leo Castelli Gallery.

Credit: Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Leo Castelli Gallery

Philippe Bonan: Portraits Of The Artists

Prior to the invention of photography we barely knew what artists looked like beyond their enhanced self-portraits, if indeed they painted them. Nowadays, everyone is an artist, and everyone has a camera, so there's no lack of documentaries on the artist at play, the artist at work, the artist drunk, the artist being kissed by the celebrity. In the 21st century, there is little doubt the artist is a celebrity, too, and portraits are much in demand (just ask Timothy Greenfield-Sanders).  The straight up portrait, the official gaze of the artist without props, attempts to read the mind of the creative, focusing on the eyes, the skin texture, this fantastic being of our time.

Philippe Bonan, a French photographer with a voracious appetite for capturing artists on film, has a quest: Produce a massive catalog of living artists wherever they are. But he wants to keep it all very simple, but elegant, and above all real.

During the opening of Anthony Caro's exhibition at Danielle Templon in Paris, Philippe Bonan was visibly angling in the crowd around the sculptor to get off a shot. The French photographer has made a profession out of portraying artists in black and white or color, in their studios or, sometimes in front of their installations. Bonan's catalog of artists is impressive – Keith Haring, Ben Vautier, Daniel Buren, Christian Boltanski, George Baselitz, Arman, Fernando Botero, Valerio Adami – numbering in the hundreds.

Bonan's portraits generally lack props (Arman poses with a parrot in one, however) and steer clear of guise. These portraits are simple and real: only the artist in his or her environment, standing, sitting, aware of the lens but not disturbed by it. Some do, however, act out a mini-fantasy – Ben Vautier (above) scowling with his text work: Je veux rester le seul. (I want to be the only one). Or Icelandic artist Katrin Fridriks in paint-splattered art uniform curled up in her studio. Wearing. Bunny. Ears.

There is virtue in Bonan's great project: Like Vasari, the 16th century Italian painter generally credited with launching art historical writing with his literary sketches of the lives of his contemporaries, seeing artists as they live and work – "as they are" – not only dispels myths but permits those interested in understanding our time to fully grasp the fleeting presence artists have, even while their work carries on. Bonan's passion is real, and his project is, as artist after artist is added to his extensive black and white catalog, valuable both historically and visually.

A 1988 portrait of painter Hans Hartung, shows the artist tired, perhaps even beleaguered, full on in a close up; Hartung's thick black glasses obscure his face; he is revealed, if only for a moment.  Jim Dine is portrayed looking into a mirror; Donald Baechler in his studio in front of an unfinished, giant collage; Fabrice Hybert in sporty shorts and scarf leaning on the door jam to his kitchen. There is little heroicism about any of these images – thankfully – and that fact leads to their great interest.

Fascinating indeed is the ordinary photograph of the young Jasper Johns in his downtown New York loft in the early 1950s, fresh-faced and eager to take on the art world. Or a pale Andy Warhol walking along Madison Avenue on his way to work.  Pollack, bearded, pasty and fat, circa 1955 staring off into an uncertain future, headed for disaster is prescient because the photograph is simply him, the artist cast in the net of his own life.  A young Keith Haring (above), thoughtful, quiet having enjoyed a wild success, but whose days are numbered. Bonan camps around the same fire, and you can see in the eyes his artist subjects return to him, that they too, know they are but just a flicker in the landscape. But the warmth generated from Bonan's activity is genuine.  Take a look: Philippe Bonan.

Photograph of Philippe Bonan by © Didier Gicquel. All other images © Philippe Bonan.

Portrait: Thomas Fougeirol

I recently had the pleasure to visit painter Thomas Rougeirol's studio in Ivry-sur-Seine to talk about some of his new large canvases, his influences and processes.

This studio, one of two the French-born painter maintains (the other is in Bushwick, Brooklyn) is immense by any standard. But there is no sign of anyone else working here. His is a one-person operation, and by a quick calculation, Fougeirol works non-stop, as there are literally thousands of large and medium-sized canvases filling this giant factory space. 

Fougeirol works with positives and negatives, largely in black and white, and manipulates the paint-drenched canvas "brush" to map out the areas he's interested in accenting.  A serious collection of plastic shower curtains allows him to create all-over patterns that are by turn ghostly and photograph.

Thomas paints with his body, that is, he presses oil paint-soaked canvases and other items against his stretched canvases, and traces out a pattern line by line to produce a kind of monotype.  It is hard to produce anything larger than the size of his own body as he works on the floor, but some of his canvases measure 2.5 x 3.5 meters and "just get out the door," he says.

What's key for the 45-year old artist is that he isn't using machines to produce his works, say, in the manner Christopher Wool has recently by creating a mosaic out of an abstract painted pattern, refashioning them in Photoshop and producing a silkscreen. "No, I am the machine," Fougeirol insists.  In a way that Klein used bodies to produce magic works.  Or in a way that skid marks are made on a street: With the application (hard and fast) of the car brakes.  Other works are piled up spiraling custards of black or silver oil paint; several portray chandeliers, but almost all intimate death in an elegant, lush, near monumental fashion.

I mention two great German artists – Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter – and Fougeirol nods, familiar not only with their techniques, mystery and iconography but also with the deeper sense of their investigations – and his:  "The work here focuses on death, its immutability and its evasiveness." Thomas toys with a human skull he uses as a studio prop for paintings.  I look around: There is an enormous energy in these works, a kind of life-affirming activity, and a glowing light emanating from these canvases.

The imagery shifts quickly and easily from giant skulls, beds and armoires to a dark tangle of old branches in black. Some canvases are painted in hot flourescent pink, yellow and silver, and are printed over in a black grid. There is a wild thrill attached to all of these canvases, as if you're looking into the artist's open heart.  

See studio images here.  Gallery website: Praz-Delavallade.

Keith Donovan: Erotic English Armchair

Keith Donovan, a painter based in Le Jouhet, France, recently produced a hand painted erotic English armchair for collector in Switzerland and he's shared this with Store Front Windows.  The chair, originally a family heirloom, was transformed with erotic images this September into a high-end work of art.  One might say this is a perfect love seat, but you'd have to be sitting on someone to fit. Perhaps that's the idea. Hot seat.

Donovan follows a long history of artists who have reworked chairs, tables, even baby cribs as renovated art objects – such as Keith Haring, Claes Oldenburg, Marcel Broothaers among others.

"The image concerns heroic postures, and the memory of gentlemen who roamed the world and sat (later on) to recount the highs and lows.  It's andropausal in a way."

The images hail from 18th century French engravings from five different artists including the widely celebrated erotic Frenchman, Borel.

Check out the web site: Keith Donovan,

Banksy Speaks

"But I can't help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something."

– Banksy on his rising fame, from the article in the The Sun UK.

Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody's Fool At The Asia Society New York City

I met Yoshitomo Nara eight years ago just outside of Paris during an exhibition of his works at the Cneai, for his exhibition "Who snatched the babies?"

That show featured his full on take on snarling little girls wielding guns and knives.  The Cneai was jam packed with works and each one had, it seemed, taken the artist on some personal trip into anger, frustration, solitude and yet a distinct sense of humor and irony about it all.

The paintings and drawings – some of them whipped out fairly quickly – were all lovingly made.

At the time I was writing a piece on superflat Japanese pop art that included a massive group exhibition by Takashi Murakami at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. [That review exists but is no longer on the net; if you'd like to see it I can e mail you the PDFs. Write: Editor SFW.]

Mr. Nara who then spoke a halting English was very relaxed, hanging out with a bunch of his friends both Japanese and French, adorned in rock star sunglasses and enjoying the quiet reception for his work.

The artist was kind enough to sign a catalog for me, and even added a drawing of one of his signature little snarling girls blasting through space in a Jetson-like vessel. Since then, of course, Yoshitomo Nara's career has defied any notion of gravity. He has skyrocketed into the highest echelons of the art world (and art market) with these extremely simple but wildly sophisticated works.  Oddly enough, reaction to Mr. Nara's work is almost always joy and laughter.  At least that's from my informal poll.

He is a generous if slightly tortured artist who, as Roberta Smith writing in The New York Times noted, has seamlessly moved from high to low and all the middle genres in art without missing a step.

The artist now takes on New York with “Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool” on view through Jan. 20 at Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street; (212) 288-6400.  Asia Society Website.

See: Roberta Smith's review in NYT (September 9, 2010).

Martin Wöhrl At Emmanuel Perrotin Paris

Martin Wöhrl, Munich-based sculptor, at his opening in Paris at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, 10 impasse Saint Calude 75003 Paris), in front of one of his sun sculptures.  The pieces, he said, are composed of bits of cut wood that nobody wants.  They are composed using a range of colors from laminated wood and formica, a 1970s expression of home décor.  Other works are square or rectangular and riff off of a number of formalists from Malevich to Albers to Christian Eckhardt.

Photo: Martin Wöhrl in front of one of his works in Paris.

The New Yorker, writing about his debut exhibition in NYC, said of his assemblages "they call to mind shabby-chic artifice."

This is the 37-year old artist's first exhibition in Paris, and the ensemble of the dozen pieces fits perfectly in this chapel-like space.

Wöhrl is represented by Spencer Brownstone in New York.

Pinocchio

Pinocchio is a fictional character that first appeared in 1883, in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.

Collage by Matthew Rose. 2010.

Max's Kansas City : 1968

From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin and Tim Buckley, at Max’s Kansas City, 1968

Courtesy Elliott Landy/Landyvision and Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC

Randy Kennedy article and photos from the NYT.

Cutlog 2010 New Contemporary Art Fair Paris

Cutlog’s next edition will take place at the Bourse du Commerce, october 21-24, 2010. 

Download the registration form for cutlog 2010 here

cutlog is a contemporary art fair in the heart of Paris, situated under the 1000 m2 dome of the Bourse du Commerce, 100 metres from the Cour Carrée du Louvre, between Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou), Concorde (Jeu de Paume museum) and the Grand Palais. 

Both an alternative and a complement to current parisian and international art fairs, cutlog is a vibrant intersection for artists, collectors, gallerists, curators and museum directors worldwide. The 30 to 40 galleries chosen to participate in cutlog 2010 will be selected for their independent or emerging status, or their ongoing support for emerging artists across the globe. cutlog will welcome a large number of private collectors and prestigious institutions, both French and International. cutlog’s jury will award a prize to the fair’s most surprising artist as well as an invitation to exhibit independently at cutlog 2011.

The Art Cure: THE ART CURE's International Artists Call

The Art Cure: THE ART CURE's International Artists Call: "We’ve had very warm responses from non-local artists wishing to donate artwork to The Art Cure project but not fitting the criteria of havin..."

Fluxface in Space: Exhibition Slide Show

Fluxface in Space: Exhibition Slide Show: "Fluxface in Space"

Andy Warhol Receives A Letter From The Campbell Soup Company - 1964

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE & READ.

GAY RIGHTS: SIGNS OF THE TIMES

See original post: http://twitpic.com/2bq5h4

The Unbearable Lightness Of Mercede Johnston

While reading Gail Collins column in today's New York Times, I learned that a subplot in the made-for-television romance, drama, tragedy, comedy that is Sarah Palin and her brood and her brood's made-for-television romance, drama, etc., Mercede Johnston, Levi's sister, has been blogging away up in Wasilla. And she tells all.  Well, she tells as much as she can tell and she gripes away in between photos of herself and Bristol and Levi and stories about four-wheeling up in Alaska.
 
So if you haven't spent an hour of your life reading through the backwoods of the Levi Johnston - Bristol Palin story told from a family member in a free-form diary, enjoy Mercede Johnston.

http://www.mercedejohnston.com/

Shakespeare & Company Paris

The bulletin board at Shakespeare & Company, Paris.  Notes and photomaton shots from visitors in the kids reading corner at the famed Paris bookshop on the Left Bank.