For immediate release
Nicolas
Touron: The Kingdom
Dates: April 15-May 22, 2010
Opening: Thursday, April 15, 2010, 6 - 8 pm
Location: 526 West 26th Street - 4th Floor -
Room 416 - New York, NY
Gallery
Hours: Tuesday to
Saturday 11 am - 6 pm and Saturday 12 - 6 pm and by appointment
Nicolas Touron is a
storyteller, and like a gifted one of the oral tradition, he enhances and
embellishes his tales each time they're told. As an artist he creates engaging
and complex work in both painting and sculpture that, through concepts of
movement, evolution, characters, and motifs, suggest larger narratives.
Departing from traditional approaches, Touron's stories never have specific
beginnings or ending, and in this way become visual embodiments of the living
process of storytelling.
Touron's third exhibition at
Virgil de Voldère Gallery includes a series of paintings of oil marker and pen
on wood, called The Kingdom. The
primary work, though, is Le Fou,
a sculptural object that looks like a biologist's lab table crossed with an
outdoor rotisserie cooker. It's actually a fully functioning kaleidoscope, and
to create these vibrant, fascinating images Touron arbitrarily places things
like tiny plants in front of plastic fans-as well as paper cut outs, prints,
and ceramic doorknobs (created and fired by the artist, with his own drawings
fused onto their surfaces)-in front of an apparatus of mirrors and a camera for
projection onto the gallery wall. These rather ordinary items make for a
unique, powerful, even transformative experience, and the kaleidoscope becomes
a metaphor for the complexities of storytelling, the images shifting and
evolving as visual equivalents of spoken words.
Echoing the shape of the
kaleidoscope, Touron's paintings are circular and looping in their own way. The
tondo format he employs dissolves the traditional figure-ground relationship,
presenting a dizzyingly complex scene that, like singular animated cells of a
longer narrative, insists on and eventually rewards extended viewing. The shape
of the paintings also recalls similar devices, such as the microscope,
telescope, and periscope. Are we looking at an infinitesimal world at the
molecular level, or life on some kind of distant globe?
Characters and objects
reappear from past works, such as fragmented tree trunks and waddles of green
penguins, which are joined by gray airborne vehicles and military helicopters.
Other familiar tropes are recognizable: gummy pinks and gooey greens;
fluttering ribbons and flying sheets of paper; oozing, doughy creatures and
puffy organic growths. In all the commotion, it's hard to believe the paintings
are fixed, static.
The paintings' titles
indicate characters in a king's court, and black-and-white patterned Islamic
tiles emerge in all the works. Are these benign references to history and
culture, or darker allusions to domination or imperialism? In the past Touron
has played with politics in his work, and, while less rife here, those ideas
stealthily and ambiguously creep in. In the recent past, critics have noticed
hints of fairy tales in his paintings, but these new works demonstrate a
commitment to telling the story of his own distinct universe.
Please contact the gallery
for further information: + 1 212 343 9694.