Friday, March 25, 2011
'Into One-Another To Pier Paolo Pasolini'
Berlinde De Bruckyere's work is a pervasive assault against the crass commercialization of the body, and it's outcome, the corruscating lack of eros/spirituality in our now social construct as described by Pasolini of obedient slaves to mass production and consumption.
Her raw human forms,…are unencumbered by place, paradigm, or predicament,…these human simulacra,…sculptural creations pull humanism back from the brink of extinction and Pasolini's 'desperate vitality' out of the grave,…simple, clean, realism, the prone bodies are made tender by an inchoate vulnerability,…Rendered in layers of wax upon postures from the bodies of dancers, then colored and placed,…let down gently in vitrines, laid out on slabs.
This work w/the figure,…is a subtle meditation, a psychic landscape of earthly desire, imbued with a painful reflection on mortality,…BDB captures the force of desire, as it plays out across this fragile human landscape, and it's voracious insinuation into every human crevice,…Vitality is roused, then ruptured by exhaustion, desire having taken it's toll upon the pure, human body.
Devoid of decorative artifice, no gilding the lily here,…relieved of history, patrimony,…these are bodies at their most naked and mortal, unwrapped from circumstance, they are life incarnate.
Her figures wrap themselves in a primal erotic, tenderness, move into their respective natural cavities, explore a fervid copulation,...
This is the stuff of secular cathedral altars,…
'Inside Me',…is a mass of twining, connected branches, again made from luminous layers of wax, displaying the sinuous curvatures created by nature's potent force, stand ins for and replicating aching, arching human desire,…A massive bundle of nerve and veins, a cascade of pulsating nature,…all held, wrapped in a protective bunting on a wooden frame,…an altar of throbbing, then broken guts.
Several drawings titled Romeu 'my deer' are faint, sensitive renderings of the body with cascading antlers coming out of the head cavity, drooping downward, desire sated, energy broken, played out and feeding now into the ground or destructive of and growing back into the body that carries them,…
Without heads, the pulse of the human heart beat is housed in the nerve endings, ascending then descending through the torso, from the length of body to the exposed naked and splayed feet,…A face would be unbearable,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel @ Mary Boone Gallery
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Imi Knoebel’s work is a bright spot in a dark world. Like the ad says,…’Add color to your life and your décor’. Not a bad thing to be in this, our hopefully long overdue, brave new world,…Maybe these are the first flutterings, the signs of a spring here,…Well Imi Knoebel is not a wound too tight kind of guy, or trussed up like Glenn Brown, or wound down to sludge but more like a lotus sprung bright out of fertile mud,…And he’s definitely from some mixed fertile beginnings, soil from the likes of Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Joseph Beuys. Imi Knoebel’s work goes casual, loosens it up, springs from the board of classic, lean modernism but more sprightly, louder and way less demanding,…uncomplicated. Like when you see orange and black, it doesn’t mean Halloween,…It’s just black as black and then orange as orange and yellow as yellow, green as green, etc.,…Stop looking for a problem to solve, a way in,…Take these paintings at face value,…Rootless no, cut loose from meaning, yes! Freshen up, press your re-fresh button now.
Like opening up your first box of fresh crayolas,…not iconic as Ellsworth Kelly or even wanting, needing to be now,…Knoebel makes that ethos seem frozen, while his organic, lung-ta’s fly round the gallery,…His forthright simple geometries of real color,…a pleasure. Front and center, suspended,…not so rigorous and chock full of the life that is not codified, structured or honed to a master plan,…presages new beginnings, keep it opened up,…anemones floating,…Simple, adroit,…It’s about the color!
Stephanie Bell Behnke
Thursday, January 1, 2009
'Oh Happy New Year 2009' 'Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back'
Oh Happy New Year 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
‘Consciousness, Cracking It Up and Get Your Wonder Back’
What is it that Kate Gilmore, Pipilotti Rist, Gemma Smith and Urs Fischer all have in common,…??? They are charged energy, cracking it up, moving it out, crashing through walls and pushing us out of the box,…over the precipice, out through the garden, over the walls, under the earth, to the land of random, out of bounds, out of range, out of time and space and into the great beyond, a heady start for this auspicious new year,…change you can feel,…the uncategorized all coming at you,…Out with the old, visors off, eyes glinting from a wide opened sun filled retina…What does it mean,…Consciousness opened out,…Implications global,…old, worn out, political and social institutions giving way,…On all levels, artists are on the loose, moving out and heading toward each other, breaking away from the ancient pedigrees, turf wars,…fences are breaking. We are inexorably charging past the old markers, not charting the passage and claiming the universe as our infinite territory. Does that have us in free fall, bounding through space, no attachment, no state, no homeland,…A big resounding YES,…YES, YES!!! Will instinct rule, a Darwinian feed forward, survival of the fittest, vile Zombies with heat and no morals,…NO,…NO, NO!!!…Does the big bang look back,…Do the Zen masters not jump off the 100 foot pole. This is not chaos but the kind of life giving momentum that pulls us all off the sofa, out of the ditch, to a universal table large enough to feed, propagate and spread the life energy throughout the universe,…Get out your pick axes, your propellers, open your eyes wide artists and get going. Consciousness is waiting,…
Stephanie Bell Behnke 2009
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