Tag Archives: paper

Romantic Predilections: Simon Schubert at Foley Gallery

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Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

German artist Simon Schubert presents gothic interiors with minimalist means in his current exhibition “Multa Nocte” (meaning “deepest night”) at Foley Gallery. To the left, an entire gallery wall is covered with white paper, on which the artist has created interior spaces simply by folding and creasing individual sheets. To the right, the entire wall is dark, covered with graphite paper, among which the artist has placed finely rendered charcoal illustrations of house exteriors, candles, and Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe House, 2015 (L), Portrait Edgar Allan Poe, 2015 (R)

Untitled (Poe House New York), 2015 (L), Portrait Edgar Allan Poe, 2015 (R)

The subject matter is not just Poe, as in the portrait above, but the architecture associated with the American Romantic author of mysteries and detective stories. Schubert portrays historical addresses associated with Poe or those described in his writings. Houses, a single candle, entryways, candelabra, a tree, Poe himself….all embrace Romantic cliche. The medium works to the the artist’s advantage as the black-on-black creates something like the slippery image of a daguerreotype: disappearing and reappearing depending on where you stand in relation to the light source. It works because it is simply  done, leaving the excess to the imaginative subject matter: burning 19th century homes, the waning candle, the ill-fated Poe’s stare.

Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Lacking human figures, aside from the presiding portrait of Poe, the spaces themselves become protagonists. Especially in the folded white paper works, where Schubert creates empty interiors, the artist implies a psychology of space. For example, there are several stairways, one in particular with a perspective to induce vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock also favored stairs as sites of psychological resonance). These atmospheric constructions of space manage to convey drama and loss without a human subject.

Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

Installation view, Simon Schubert, Multa Nocte at Foley Gallery

In a seeming concession to the melodrama of the subject matter, a small model of a house created of dark green iridescent feathers sits in the middle of the gallery. A large seascape in charcoal anchors the back wall. If you want to indulge yourself, and you know you do, head down to the Lower East Side to view these carefully made works on paper.

On view through October 18. More about the exhibition here.

Andrea Dezsö’s Tunnel Books: Interior Worlds

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I remember seeing a model of a stage set as a child, and being fascinated with the elaborate world created when elaborately painted scenes were dropped in at the top, and peering in through the front of the box a fantastical miniature world was created backdrop by backdrop. Andrea Dezsö‘s surrealist cut-paper tunnel books reminded me of it, except her work speaks to a decidedly wilder and darker place, a garden run riot after the fall of man. This work was up at the Nancy Margolis gallery in Chelsea earlier this year (better late than never has become my grad school motto).

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Art Fair Trend: Paper Cut, Diced, Collaged, and Folded

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Seong Chun, Untitled Without End

Artists were doing so much with paper beyond collage, and I was really impressed with how malleable the typically flat medium was in the hands of artists like Seong Chun, above and below. Her other works on view at Pulse created similarly geometric forms whose shape belied their delicateness and intricacy. They seem obsessive and painstaking, even more so when I learned the artist prints the words onto the paper herself.

Seong Chun, detail

While trend sounds like group think, what artists do with this material is anything but. I wasn’t sure if William Daniel’s sculpture was paper when I first saw it because it is quite perfect and precise. It looks like it was taken from the chapel of an Italian church, and I enjoy how it plays with our perceptions of reality and materiality, and ultimately in its memento mori subject how it tackles death with something as unsubstantial as paper.

William Daniels, Vase of Flowers in a Window Niche, 2004

It’s hard to get a sense of the mass created in this collage by Francis Stark, which takes up surprising volume. In its awkward, gawky way, it builds up into a Frankenstein lady of beauty.

Francis Stark, Not Yet Titled, 2010

The groups of works below from Abigail Reynold‘s Universal Now series are probably my favorite work of cut collage. Her collages enmesh found photographs of landmarks and monuments that were taken from a similar vantage point at different points in time.

Abigail Reynolds, Installation View at Armory

It creates an interesting interplay between times, and visually the flipped up edges of paper make one examine the work from multiple angles. Overall it plays with geometric lines in three instead of two dimensions–sharing a quality I appreciated in Seong Chun’s work. Here a photograph from 1989 is underlying a photo from 1991.

Abigail Reynolds, Post Office Tower 1989/1999, 2009

On the less than interesting side of this paper collaging fever…I’ve seen an inordinate amount of Victoriana collages, in general and during the fairs, often tinting and/or cutting old Victorian engravings to create fantastic scenes. Such simplistic collage would be more interesting with a less trite subject.

Ruth Marten, Gathering