g-module presents a new series of acrylic works by New York painter Andrew Chesler. The ten science fiction-inspired paintings explore the idea that technological achievement threatens to fling humankind into a surreal primordial realm populated by the hybrid offspring of technology and nature.
The Play-Doh-colored, stain-based paintings possess the signature atmospheric, otherworldly qualities of the artist's past work. In this series Chesler adds forms which could be portraits -- perhaps of beings born of Chesler's terrestrial apocalypse, perhaps creatures from another planet. Or the subject could be the still life that decorates their tables, or even the landscape that appears out of their windows.
In these spare, yet electric paintings, accretions of obscure shapes, which suggest polished stones, slept-on pillows, or amphibian egg sacs, appear to be drawn to each other by some unseen force-- magnetic? sexual?-- that binds them together. In many of the works, little probes enter and leave the central figure, off the picture plane, implying some exploration or linking: but to what?
Just as Chesler's work simultaneously evokes primordial and futuristic worlds, so do his influences come from the past and the future: the washes of color harken back to color field abstraction, while the "solid" forms bear the influence of computer graphics.
Andrew Chesler was born in New York City, earned a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. He has had one-person shows in New York and Atlanta, shown extensively in both the United States and Europe, and has independently curated projects in New York. New Paintings is his first solo exhibition in Europe.
IMAGE:
Andrew Chesler
Kihei, 2000
acrylique sur toile
122 x 137 cm (48 x 54 inches)
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