Installation at Grand Teatro Alicia Alonso during 13th Havana Biennial (2019) (Photo: Thomas Jaeckel)

JOSE VINCENCH

Recent Works 

February 5 – 26, 2022

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to present Recent Works by José Ángel Vincench, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.  

Working with gold leaf to compose elegant abstractions of gold and white, a balance of seemingly facile geometric forms and bizarre idiosyncracies, Vincench attempts to dismantle the discordant countenance of Cuba through artistic measures.  These asymmetric abstractions utilize the precious, and often spiritual, material that is gold as a vessel to not only bend light, but shine it on Cuban social life and political idealism.  “Their asymmetry reflect the asymmetry – absurdity, certainly contrariness – of Vincench’s situation in Cuba: an artist making abstract art implicity critical of its authoritarianism doesn’t exactly fit into it, however tolerated he may be, even respected as an intriguing anomaly, that is, the proverbial and celebrated exception that proves the rule.” – Donald Kuspit

Vincench (born 1973, Holguín, Cuba) is a Cuban artist, living and working in Havana. He completed his art studies in Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). His works have been exhibited in New York, Zurich, and Havana.  He is featured in the UBS Art Collection, New York, and Chris von Christierson Collection, London, as well as many private collections internationally.

Danny Rolph

Hudson River

November 12- January 22, 2022

Full Press Release (link)

View the show on Artsy (link) 

For further information or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact us at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by e-mail at info@532gallery.com

In Between Beneath The Mirror, 2020, Acrylic, Mixed media on canvas, 83″ x 53″

Jean-Guerly Petion

Americana Dreaming

September 9 – October 16, 2021

Americana Dreaming, an exhibition of new work by Jean Guerly Pétion at Gallery 532 Thomas Jaeckel, presents 16 new works by the Haitian-born artist.

Americana Dreaming presents a disorderly, non-thematic body of work executed with stunning visual flair and stamped with a highly distinctive graphical sensibility. Fiercely, even overtly polemical, these artworks foreground the emotional life of the Black artist while simultaneously alluding to a broad range of literary and theoretical influences, ranging from classical myth to post-structuralist philosophy.

Using techniques from painting, mixed media, and assemblage, Pétion creates phantasmagorical vision-scapes in which colorful decorative elements, surrealist symbols, and potent images of Black identity come together in a dynamic visual carnival. Images of butterflies, flowers, soccer balls, and ferns create an oneiric vocabulary of signs and symbols; elsewhere, a series of densely layered abstractions, suggestive of TV static or electronic noise, showcase the artist’s abiding interest in repetition as a formal tactic.

Americana Dreaming (2018; 27” x 27,” acrylic and barbed wire on masonite) is a forceful image of Black freedom and the denial thereof by a racist and oppressive society. A Black woman’s face, painted in dense and vivid colors reminiscent of the work of Beauford Delaney, looks out at the viewer with an unreadable look — sombre? tragic? defiant? while her hand, caressing a startling blond braid, protrudes from the American flag she is draped in. Most strikingly, the figure is outlined in actual barbed wire, which has been affixed to the surface of the painting; a crushingly specific and alarming visual touch. This sculptural touch endows the composition with a dimensionality that heightens the effect’s chilling impact. The word “Americana,” meanwhile, is redolent of artifacts, trinkets, kitsch, the manufactured visual language of a country trying to sell itself on its own image, but the reality of this image plays against this retrograde word with vatic force. 

In Between Beneath the Mirror (2018; 80” x 54,” mixed media: paper, fabrics, and acrylic on canvas) features an enigmatic dark-skinned figure with angel wings, blowing a trumpet beneath a sky spangled with lights and butterflies. This mysterious image, with its biblical overtones, seems to call up myriad associations without being tied down to any literal or narrative framework. It speaks of freedom and joy, maybe, but it has a haunted quality; the figure is encircled by a plank fence, suggesting limitations of ambit and agency. The disjunction of the figure’s ethereal background and the jaunty harlequin colors of the figure’s trousers adds an irreverent de-centering visual factor. What, exactly, is being announced?

Reciprocal (2021; 120 x 79”, mixed media: acrylic, paper, collage, and fabric on canvas) is a compositionally complex, large-scale tour de force that is a virtual catalogue of Pétion’s motifs. The painting is bifurcated into two large, panel-like halves, with a jewel-like trompe l’oeil pattern running across the entire bottom of the painting. The left-hand panel features a thin, glamorous-looking woman of indeterminate race in a star-spangled bikini, outlined against a zebra-skin background; the right-hand panel is a kaleidoscopic roundelay of colorful orbs and collaged faces taken from magazines and fashion catalogues. The eyes of both the collaged faces and the mysterious woman are covered with black bars of the kind used to hide the eye color of suspected criminals in old-fashioned lineup photos; a literal de-facing, of sinister affect. Images of beach balls, pelicans, and a white picked fence suggest the iconography of the domestic utopia of middle-class leisure, which stands in sardonic contrast to the occluded faces. The painting as a whole synthesizes these images of the erotic, the exotic, and the domestic into a surreal and mysterious visual fugue.

Pétion, who has also authored surrealistic erotic narratives set in Port-au-Prince and in New York City, himself speaks of the ideas behind his work in dense, gnomic fragments. He describes the work featured in title tk as “a series of failures” whose “lacunae and repetition intentionally perform a syncretic cathartic liberating gesture” and whose “fragments and images are actually connected” as part of a “trajectory of rhizomic lines of flight and events.” 

This tensile theoretical armature derives from his readings of the work of deconstructionist writers like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, as well as post-colonialist scholars such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose concept of the subaltern informs the polemicist thrust and liberatory energy of much of Pétion’s visual narratives. The contrast between the hothouse explosion of Pétion visual style and the cool, cerebral armature of its intellectual grounding lends his artistic practice the gravity borne of a bracing dialectical interplay.

Jean-Guerly Pétion was born in Haiti and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA) and at CalArts (MFA). His paintings confront emotionally charged first- and third-world class issues via theoretical texts and compelling images. His art has been featured in the California African American Museum and the 18th Street Art Center. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California. 

Full Press Release: Jean-Guerly Pétion “Americana Dreaming”

For further information or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact us at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by e-mail at info@532gallery.com

Brian Cirmo

Where Teardrops Fall

May 20 – July 22, 2021

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel is pleased to announce Where Teardrops Fall, an exhibition of new paintings by Brian Cirmo. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. 

Where Teardrops Fall tells tales of contemporary malaise and nostalgia. Together or in solitude, Cirmo’s nearly life-sized figures inhabit interiors, sit on park benches, or float out at sea. A follow up to the artist’s first exhibition Gray Matters (2019-20) in which he told stories like a visual novelist, this exhibition maintains Cirmo’s commitment to narrative, but visually resounds with a soundtrack of blues, jazz, folk, and 90s pop. 

We look over the shoulder of one girl in Girl Interrupted (2020) as she holds the iconic Alanis Morissette album Jagged Little Pill (1995), and we feel the nostalgia of one boy walking past a shelf with He-Man figures in Boy Toys (2020). The girl and the boy are mouthless but not grotesque—it’s as if they simply can’t speak to their sense of longing as well as the paintings of them can.

But not all memories are tinged with the mythic innocence of childhood in Where Teardrops Fall. In Agent Orange (2020) we see the profile of a soldier’s face painted in camouflage. His steely eyes and the cigarette between his lips both recall Ernst Kirchner’s Self Portrait as Soldier (1915), thus suggesting an inner trauma beneath his dissociated expression, one expressed externally by the loud orange background. 

Throughout the exhibition, Cirmo is a witty interlocutor with modernist art history—the labels from Jasper Johns’s Ballantine’s ale cans (1964) make a cameo below a Thelonius Monk poster on the wall in Have You Heard the News (2020); a Max Ernst frottage landscape with moon (1927) is the setting for a self-portrait with a Sun Studio t-shirt in The Sun and the Moon (2020); and a man is caught between Barnett Newman’s “zips“ behind him and Jackson Pollock’s splatters before him—reflected in his sunglasses—in Expression Reflection (2020).  

This engagement with modernism is seen not only in visual quotations, but in Cirmo’s compositional geometry—as well as his subversion of that geometry. Right angle structures referencing modernist grids are used in service of narrative, humor, and expression. A woman sits on the steps of a front stoop composed of lines parallel and perpendicular to the edges of the canvas in Somewhere Over the Rainbow (2020). The rainbow stripes running down the sleeve of her sweatshirt seem disconnected from her melancholic pose. Is the green-strawed, plastic cup from a chain coffee store next to her half empty or half full? Before a life raft of lethargic figures in Cast Away (2020), a shark rears its head from the water. Its jaws are open at a perfect right angle as it cinematically bares its teeth—a humorous rendering that seems to ask if modernism still has teeth of its own.

These modernist tropes are countered not only by narratives but by rich decorative patterns, such as the humble rug painted in a luxuriously tactile manner in Sorry (2020), an overhead view of two figures and a cat sprawled over the eponymous board game. Crucially, these patterns and textures provide ways of feeling the story, much like textures in music do.

The exhibition’s title is a line from a song by Bob Dylan, who figures in the painting Lost in the Crowd (2020). We stand with the now Nobel laureate, gazing over his shoulder past the harmonica holder at his lips and the guitar neck in his hand, and past the brilliant red stage to an ambivalent crowd of fans—some ecstatic, some asleep. The work seems representative of a broader crisis of not knowing how to respond to a world of virtual hyper-stimulation and real ongoing trauma. Do we wake up or bury our heads? Cirmo’s humorous and empathetic take on human foibles and vulnerabilities gives us the space to consider these questions as we feel and hear his characters’ stories. 

Brian Cirmo (b. 1977, Utica, NY) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University at Albany, and his work has been exhibited in Boston, Pomona, New Orleans, and Washington DC. His residencies include the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Granville, NY; and Salem Art Works Residency, Salem, NY. Cirmo lives and works in Albany, NY.

Interview with Brian Cirmo

For further information or to schedule an interview with the artist, please contact us at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by e-mail at info@532gallery.com