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Tag: art

Monday In The Light

Published February 26, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Pensive faces, ambiguous light sources, and mysterious spaces characterize the atmospheric drawings of Moonassi, whose solo exhibition Murmures at Vazieux Gallery delves into the surreal world of memory and emotions.

In black-and-white ink and acrylic, the Seoul-based artist cross-hatches figurative scenes onto Korean hanji paper, portraying deep contrasts, dualities, and tensions. Rich, black shadows reveal glowing hands and faces, exploring relationships between light and dark, awareness and the unconscious, presence and absence, and the known and unknown.

Moonassi uses meok, a type of traditional Korean inkstick ground against a stone with water to produce a liquid medium. The meditative process of preparing the ink helps the artist focus on the task at hand and concentrate on each step.

the painting of Dhaka-born, LA and Portland-based painter, Srijon Chowdhury. His last solo show, The Nude, was on view at Ciaccia Levi, Milan in 2023.

Something born out of a rough doodle, redid a more ‘proper’ little sketch out of it before colours.
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Burned Books And Bad Robots

Published February 21, 2024 by Warren Ellis

When Vesuvius erupted in AD79—the same eruption that buried Pompeii—the papyrus rolls in the villa were carbonized. Without enough oxygen to combust and turn to ash, they became charcoal instead.

This meant the scrolls were fused solid and to get at the writing inside, they had to be opened. This process has been ongoing since the 1750s and researchers have just entered a new stage, thanks to AI. The lumps of carbonized scroll have been digitally scanned and, using 3D mapping and AI, researchers have been unable to “virtually unroll” the papyri and detect letters. This process has, for example, allowed them to read a previously unknown philosophical work discussing the senses and pleasure by the Epicurean philosopher and poet, Philodemus.

Matt Webb takes his first ride in a robotaxi:

It wasn’t a great first ride, on the way up.

We approached a school bus and blocked the road. The Waymo didn’t leave room. While we were waiting, the school bus drive waved at me to get out of the way. I sat in the front passenger seat. I gesticulated at the empty driver’s seat –

It’s empty! (I tried to say by waving my arms.) I’m in a haunted car! I can’t tell the ghost what to do!

Nicolás Kisic Aguirre builds rolling, gyrating, unruly machines that have been exhibited all over the world. Sometimes, however, they escape gallery spaces and take to the streets of Valparaíso or Boston where they amplify the voice of citizens protesting against racist deportations, inequality or the presence of a war criminal in town. Whether they are deployed in artistic performances or used as a tool to broadcast political messages, Kisic Aguirre’s works challenge the boundaries of our common understanding of the city and the spaces we share in it.
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Coastal Wind

Published February 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Fantastic gallery exhibition in photographs: Desert + Coast: Seven Elder Aboriginal Painters.

Cristina Camacho likens canvas stretched across a skeletal frame to skin. Both a protectant and a site for expression, the flesh is one of many layers within the body that the artist peels back to reveal what lies beneath and within. “When I first started cutting the canvas, I was very interested in stopping seeing the canvas as the surface where the paint goes,” she tells Colossal.

Dominic Chambers has focused much of his career on painting places with space. There is always a sense that his characters are thinking about or trying to get themselves into either a physical or spiritual place where there is room to breath. To be free. To have arms outstretched and a place to run.
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Art, Space, Art Space: morningcomputer 19feb24

Published February 19, 2024 by Warren Ellis

John Coulthart notes on a current-day surrealist journal.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) of material from asteroid Bennu when it returned to Earth on Sep. 24, 2023; the largest asteroid sample ever collected in space and over twice the mission’s requirement.

After many delays, Jeff Koons‘s 125 sculptures were finally sent to the moon early this morning from Cape Canaveral at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Best place for them.

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Still Blues morningcomputer 16feb24

Published February 16, 2024 by Warren Ellis

“I have spent over 40 years bearing witness to the ways in which modern civilization has dramatically transformed our planet,” says the renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky (previously). From the salt ponds of Spain to the eerie tunnels of Russia’s potash mines, Burtynsky has traveled the globe for the last four decades documenting the indelible impacts of industry.

Above, “Thjorsá River #1, Iceland (2012).” Which I think is stunning.

Jacob Kassay: An Adverse Possession of Light

When was the last time you sat in stillness? Turned off your phone? Closed your eyes and allowed your brain to neutralize and excavate an instinct deep inside, opening the senses to risk and exposure? Likely not recently. You’ve probably run far away from that place since 2020 when that was the only thing that we knew. You’ve gone back to work. To your friends. To your life. To music and dancing and laughter. Where the sun warms the skin and a cool breeze brushes softly across the face.    Sarah Lee’s mind has not left that place. It is the essence of her artwork, probing the vulnerability of silence and its echoes across nature, where it is most inherent. She paints scenes of a winter wonderland with no footprints to mark the way. A dark ocean where you could blink your eyes and believe the water is the sky. Twisted trees that contort across an unearthly green forest. Moonlight that mimics a spotlight following across a stage.
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Time And Motion morningcomputer 12feb24

Published February 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage, a.k.a. Pinaffo & Pluvinage, have worked together since 2015, fascinated by the physics, mechanics, and even pyrotechnics of our ever-evolving technologies. During 2023, the pair produced three major projects exploring ephemeral interactions and shifting textures. “If we were to find a common thread among the three major projects… it would be soft, blurry, and challenging-to-control materials: smoke, sand, fabric,” the duo tells Colossal. “Each time, there is a play in mastering and manipulating these materials.”

Detail from WASTED, Peggy Chiang, more at link

Ji Zou. They make provocative, often sexual works but with a hint of surrealism and mystery, beautifully rendered in acrylic.
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lost and found morning computer 30jan24

Published January 30, 2024 by Warren Ellis

A painting by the iconic Austrian artist believed lost for approximately 100 years will be auctioned at Vienna’s Auction House im Kinsky on April 24, 2024.

Vienna, 25.01.2024: The auction house im Kinsky will present a rediscovered masterpiece of Austrian Modernism: the Portrait of Fräulein Lieser, one of the last works created by Gustav Klimt. The painting was previously considered lost. For many decades, this important work of art has been privately owned by an Austrian citizen, unknown to the public.

A valley of lost cities has been discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon. When you hear of such a discovery you might think of archaeologists with chisels and brushes or explorers in pith helmets stumbling across sites deep in the forest. Instead, without needing to brave the hazards of the forest, Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) has revealed networks of buried roads and earthen mounds.

China Daiy offers a comprehensive essay on the painter Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) titled “Paradise Found.” Wen Zhengming was noted for “the public perception of him as a man of high moral standards who disavowed the seedy side of politics in favor of a secluded existence in the garden abode he built for himself.” In the tradition of reclusion, however, “Wen Zhengming’s self-imposed exile, as those orbiting around him might wish to call it, was lived out not in sheer harshness, but amid the many enjoyable things that Jiangnan had to offer, including its spring.” Jiangnan was a region of the southern Yangtze River Delta.
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I Feel Like Starting With Some Art

Published January 2, 2024 by Warren Ellis

French architect and artist Emmanuelle Moureaux unveiled a vibrant, seemingly infinite room in Tokyo to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Bulgari’s iconic coiled jewelry designs. The 50th work in the artist’s 100 colors series (previously), “SERPENTI” reflects timelessness and eternity through elaborate repetition and eternity through elaborate repetition, gradient hues, and a mirrors that transform a single corridor into a never-ending view.

Reflecting the brand’s roots in Rome, Moureaux installed more than 347,000 Roman numerals from 1 to 100—or I to C—onto 100 large, transparent panels, which are cut out in the middle so visitors can walk inside. The numerals are meticulously laid out on a grid to create an endless effect, increasing and changing color the further one ventures into the artwork.

Adam PendletonBlackness, White, and LightMUMOK, Vienna

March 31, 2023 – January 7, 2024

Eric C. Wilder is a freelance cover designer. He, along with designer Cherie Chapman, is co-founder of Chapman & Wilder, a studio specializing in book covers, interior layout, and marketing across all genres. Here he takes us through his process for designing the cover for Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost.

This is a great cover:

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Monday Morning Art

Published December 18, 2023 by Warren Ellis

Anna Uddenberg. (I sent this one to Lordess Foudre last night – right out of PHANTOM PLEASURE)

Rather than capture a single moment, Jason Chen (previously) weaves together photographs taken just seconds apart, creating disjointed portraits that convey movement and the passage of time. The Philadelphia-based artist often splices snapshots of the same setting and subject with slight differences in the tilt of the head, gesture, or gaze. Laced into a grid or hypnotizing circle like a photographic tapestry, the resulting images are uncanny and disorienting, nodding to fragmented identities and skewed perceptions of the self and others.

Mark Rothko, Harvard Mural Studies, 1962

Watercolor on Construction paper Dimensions7 x 6 1/8 in. (17.8 x 15.6 cm) Estate/Inventory Number91.79 Collections of Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko. 

© Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko

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