CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY

RESTLESS / NEW WORKS BY ROBERT FORNELL

SEPTEMBER 6 - OCTOBER 13, 2012

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to begin the fall season with RESTLESS. We will celebrate new work by gallery artists, and introduce two new artists whose work collectively reflects the concerns and tensions of these peripatetic times from the most personal to the most universal.
 
A gallery is a space that changes and shifts ten to twelve times a year.  Sometimes more.  But it isn't the only thing that shifts.  History is discovered, new ideas emerge, new allegiances form as eyes grow.  The world changes, and when the world changes Art changes with it.  Even the artists one is familiar with or having grown with metamorphize.  It is a truism that we live in restless times.  Once fixed values have become porous as artists explore and adapt to darker temporal shifts.   This exhibition examines some of the ways artists have met these challenges.
 
Christine Sefolosha continues to innovate her unique stance on Surrealism. She is the only painter in the exhibition, and her figures move and lurk on the canvas and paper like the shadows of cave beasts already embedded in the stone walls. She paints nocturnal arks and activated spaces populated by travelling beings that move with internal purpose through clouds, oceans, electrical storms and subterranean landscapes.
 
Solange Knopf, here in her first showing with the gallery, works on paper where she dances with decadent literary history. She fills space with intricate dream filigree, but at the same time, no matter how dark the dream, she touches her horror vacuii with light. She is, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, unstuck in time.
 
Timothy Wehrle's drawings deal with frames that can barely contain their contents. His work is subtle, beautiful and no less disquieting for its delicacy.
 
The past and present howl together in the three-dimensional yard landscapes of Kevin Sampson. There are spiritual and ancestral concerns buried beneath the deceptively chaotic skin of his sculptures. His politics are immediate and incandescent.
 
Sylvain Corentin's towers skew our expectations of balance and normalcy. They have music. One senses they rise from a steaming earth with a serial sound. He plays with the architecture of improvisation and movement, hinting at myth and defying definitions. His pieces are vertical maps of out of body experiences.
 
Lidia Syroka's work charts her own gypsy trail through the world and her wanderings through the Himalayas. Her obsession is the abstract structure of the body passing through time. She too has merged landscape and the body in deceptively simple diagrams of the soul. Her colors on handmade paper absorb the talc of the desert and the shadows of mountains.
 
Rafa Perez' imagination is endless. His shaped clay sculptures reference movements yet avoid specificity at any cost. They are futuristically contemporary yet always natural. We could see them scattered on an alien beach at low tide. But even at their strangest they explore concepts we are more familiar with; their careful textures and erupted surfaces tease the eye. Their abstraction hides mysteries and obscures all obvious answers.
 
M’onma is the dark lucid dreamer. His drawings are the immediate manifestation of hallucination. He creates mediumistically, his hand is guided by entities he has no control over yet there is a consistent language of line and imagery in his work. His is not a peaceful world. There is a Japanese context of the fantastic--almost demonic--running through the work that rivets us in its enigmatic force. This will be the first exposure of his compelling drawing anywhere.   

Other artists included in the exhibition are: Keith Goodhart, Kevin Sampson, Sylvain & Ghyslaine Staelens, and Gregory Van Maanen.

Cavin-Morris Gallery is also pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Seattle ceramic artist Robert Fornell. We have shown Mr. Fornell's work for a number of years, in particular his teaware and sakeware, which, while paying the respect due to traditional Japanese form and content, have always pushed the envelope in surface and style. In this small but entirely representative exhibition we will continue with some of the tea and sake sculptural forms with new variations as well as a new series of flat chargers in stark black and white that challenge the boundaries between glaze and painting. Rob Fornell's work has an immediate recognizability and a deep affinity with Asian spiritual practices. His work is known, respected and appreciated in Japan and Korea. This will be his first one-person exhibition in New York City.