Installation shots of Nathan Richard Phelps Inside-Out & Through. Show will be up until Monday, February 4th! Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday from noon - 6pm.
Please join Friday for our opening for Nathan Richard Phelps’ show: Inside-out & Through
Opening Reception:
Friday, January 6, 2011, 6-9pm
January 6 – February 4, 2012
Robert Berman / E6 Gallery is pleased to present Inside-out & Through, a solo show with Bay Area artist Nathan Richard Phelps. Phelps’ geometric black and white drawings and installations magnetize viewers with a boldness and seduction that cannot be escaped. His process driven work begins with a line, and builds from there, with no predetermined outcome.
Phelps challenges himself to create a shared space in which he and the audience can join minds, even if only for a brief moment. He aims to rearrange the physical world to provide a glimpse into an invisible realm that exists in his subconscious, while referencing patterns we are all familiar with. Phelps’ hand across the canvas becomes a perfect expression of the moment he is experiencing. The work grows organically with time, often with hints of nature peering through. Phelps strives to make every mark immaculate to honor the perfect beauty in this world that he hopes to discover.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Often hiding just behind the ugly and flawed is a beauty that lies there, waiting to be discovered and liberated, shared and explored. When I’m lucky I can find this beauty through my work. I’ve developed an arts practice to be able to hone in on it, touch it occasionally and give it a home to live in. While the infinite possibilities of art keep stretching deeper into the mystery, it’s this beauty, which brings me back and keeps me nourished.
With Special Musical Performance by Sofi Rox from 7-9pm
OCTOBER 2011, SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — The temporal has an illusive, magical quality in art, relating to everything from the amount of time it takes to make a particular work to the sense of time that work creates in a viewer. Pure gestures born of the relationship between painter and materials, Rob Setrakian’s paintings possess timeless characteristics, yet he’s often invoked the momentary in the titles of his solo exhibitions, such as Chronologies, Current Destinations and last year’s show at Robert Berman/E6 Gallery, Present Tense.
In ELEVEN. Setrakian’s art reaches a new intensity and specificity in terms of time. “Sometimes as you walk down the path you look straight ahead and take in the moment and the future,” he says. “Then you look back and take in the moment and the past, on all levels. That is how it has felt in the studio this last go-round.” Through three collections of eleven (eleven oils on paper, eleven oils on canvas, and eleven monotypes) Setrakian brings his formidable skills as a painter to bear upon darkness and illumination, vitality and mortality. The result adds to a still-relevant tradition of Californian abstract expressionist painting while relating visually to the revived presence of poetry, particularly lyrical poetry, within the Bay Area.
While ELEVEN. marks a day when the calendar lines up a series of numerical ones — signaling beginnings — the show also collects paintings created by Setrakian since the death of significant loved ones, including his mentor Nathan Oliveira, who had a “profound” impact on his development from the point that they first worked together in Italy in 1986. Fittingly, ELEVEN. arrives in the immediate wake of an acclaimed exhibition of Oliveira’s last canvases (at John Berggruen Gallery), demonstrating that his spirit and influence remains alive. In life and on canvas, his fellow painter Setrakian passes through fatal scenes to develop character and a vivid sense of past, present, and future experience.
Vivid experiences are guaranteed at ELEVEN..’s opening reception, a momentous family affair where the unveiling of Setrakian’s art will be matched with an album-release performance by his daughter, the ukulele-based folk and pop singer-songwriter Sofi Rox. Many of the themes present in Setrakian’s paintings take melodic form in Sofi Rox’s music, which harkens back to Woody Guthrie while incorporating the sort of soulful, expressive vocalization normally found in torch songs. ELEVEN. doesn’t avoid what Setrakian calls the “death scenes” of painting, nor those of daily life. But it passes through them to discover opportunity and scenes of energetic activity. Join the artist and his daughter at a dynamic opening event on Friday, November 11th, or meditate upon his command of matter and light during the quieter weeks that follow
CONGRATULATIONS TO MARC FICHOU ON HIS PARTICIPATION AND SECOND PLACE PRIZE FOR HIS “ORAGAMI SHARK” AT PHOTO REVIEW 2011!
Fichou’s works are currently on view at the University of the Arts Gallery in Philadelphia until October 21st and at E6 Gallery in San Francisco with Lauren Marsolier until November 5th.
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 24th from 6pm–9pm
San Francisco, September 7, 2011 – On Saturday, September 24, 2011, E6 Gallery will celebrate the opening of Recent Works by Lauren Marsolier & Marc Fichou.In their first San Francisco exhibit, French artists Lauren Marsolier and Marc Fichou individually address what they describe as “the viewer’s relationship to viewing images.”
Responding to our present day simulated environments and realities, Marsolier creates photographic images that are intentionally suspect, capturing, as she states, “a place that does not exist, a place without a history.”
Unlike traditional photography, which seizes an instant of reality or a moment in time, Marsolier’s images are shot in different places and times over the course of several months, then layered and blended until the real and fabricated become a singularly unique image. The resulting hyper-real photographs feel like viewing a place we know, but can’t quite identify.
It is this sense of disorientation in Marsolier’s work that deliberately inclines the viewer to contemplate the images as one would a painting, while curiously suspecting their fabricated nature. By contrast, Fichou’s featured body of work compels viewers to re-establish their relationship to subject and medium.
Attempting to reunite matter and its image, Fichou creates works containing their own memory, a record or recording of the past, blended with their material surface. His meticulous attention to the alchemy of that which is and that which was, is as Fichou notes, “a means to explore the conflict between escaping the real through the image and anchoring oneself to the real through matter.”
In Fichou’s recent works, instead of providing a window to an elsewhere as images commonly do, Fichou creates his images as a way to bring viewer’s attentions back to the materiality of the present, to the here and now. Inextricably interweaving matter and its image by embedding photographs and videos within the very materials used to construct the imagery they depict, Fichou integrates a form of simultaneity into his artwork where images instead of detaching themselves from matter, reflect themselves upon it.
