Butterfly Catcher – Le Guo 2012

Restless Envisioning – New Paintings by Le Guo

Opening night preview – Thursday 26th January 2012, 5pm – 9pm

Exhibition opening days/times

Fri 27th to Sun 29th January 2012, 11am – 5pm and Fri 3rd to Sun 5th February 2012, 11am – 5pm

When we envision the physical world around us what do we see? What do we fear? What do we dream? What do we create? Our envisioning isn’t always successful, but we continue envisioning.

Dismantle Mindscape No.3 – Le Guo 2012

Restless Envisioning is Le Guo’s Solo exhibition investigating the painting’s surface and the formation of the painting in relationship with the artist’s physical and emotional states in order to reveal the instability of internal and external spaces; to explore the potentiality of the panel singularly or in an associative collective context; to eliminate the concept of a final or fixed position, retaining the canvases/ panels mobility by cultivating numerous hanging alternatives, grouping them together in no specific way, allowing only time and space to determine their relative positions, exploring their potentialities and possibilities.

This exhibition showing the body of his recent work suggests a sense of growth rather than ending; an appreciation of perpetual motion, progression and proliferation. His macrocosmic / microcosmic vision combines the universe and the organism. The paintings are in a state of shifting, becoming an adjustment, oscillating between abstraction and figuration; intention and process; de-formation and re-formation; conflict and balance. The painting gives life to a state of flux, meaning is not something to be merely established and fixed, it continues a dynamic tension.

The large size paintings on paper, which are titled Monochrome Painting-English Red, Monochrome Painting-IKB and Monochrome Painting-Chinese Rouge carry not only a sense of an identity, but also a history at odds with the openness of the process. The form depends on its potential rather than going according to an anticipated plan; it collapses as it becomes present, part process rather than a focal point. The fluidity of pigment, ink and water seems to continue to flux until it finds its own resting point. The artist applies paint with a sort of intuitive gestural body movement either with brush or without, keeping the body movement in physical rhythm as if writing calligraphy or executing Tai Chi. This is painting with a sense of performance and playfulness.

The artist has stated: “My life and art practice inhabits the dichotomous worlds of conflict and balance, proposing solutions within flux, generating fluidity within the fragmented mind. I conjure a sense of an internal, intuitive, shifting reality attempting to respond to a physical world. I have a desire to narrate, but am unable to form a story”.

Le Guo was born in China and has lived in the UK for more than twenty years. He graduated from Central Saint Martins with an MA in Fine Art. He has had solo exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, Studio 3 Gallery, the Zelda Cheatle Gallery and China Art Cultural Centre. More recently his works have been exhibited in Salon Art prize, Matt Roberts Arts, The Portman Gallery and Collective, 37 Camden High Street.

no format is a new interdisciplinary visual arts gallery space based at the SFSA project – London.

no format – contemporary interdisciplinary visual arts space Second Floor Studios & Arts, Harrington Way, London, SE18 5NR

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This exhibition of the work by artist Rachel Levitas spans four years from 2007-11; this period of seismic re-alignment in the political and economic landscape is mirrored in the completion of a ten year body of work,  the emergence of new subjects and stylistic change.
The late paintings from the Tulip Mania series are prophetic works which pre-date the financial crisis. They compare excessive consumerism and reckless speculative indulgence with the craze for tulip bulbs in 17th century Holland. The Burning Books paintings included in the exhibition examine the rise of fundamentalism, the futility of trying to destroy knowledge and presage a violent conclusion to the pre-bust era. These contemporary history paintings were produced over many months, even years; the surface frequently reworked by redrawing, the marks becoming part of the painting’s patina.
The party comes to an abrupt end in 2010 with the first of the Urban Fox series as these bold and beautiful opportunists slink into streets deserted by bankrupt revellers. By contrast these images are rapidly made, wet in wet, using techniques that record fleeting night visits. The foxes represent the rise of forces previously suppressed moving into the space left by a collapsing economy; creativity emerging and adapting and perhaps too something darker, fear of the future.

Rachel Levitas grew up in Durham. She studied Fine Art at Camberwell School of Art, Advanced Printmaking at Central St Martins and Postgraduate Painting at the Royal Academy Schools where she was awarded the Turner Gold Medal for Painting. Recently Rachel has been awarded first prize at the prestigious Lynne Painter-Stainers for her painting Urban Fox III.

www.noformat.co.uk

http://www.rachellevitas.com

More info here: http://www.multipliedartfair.com/index.aspx