CARLOS SANDOVAL DE LEON: ‘20 20’

OPENING AT CENTRAL FINE, 6-9 PM, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST.

A map, magic spells, a floor-plan, or any set of directives informed by silence, duplication, triplication, the folkloric, are modes of pertinence and reference. Today is as it was thousands of years ago. What happens to the divisions and notions of the Symbolic, The Imaginary, and The Real when all three can be experienced simultaneously? 

Carlos Sandoval de Leon’s solo presentation ‘20 20’ takes on such questions and brings varying materials and forms together, charging them with specificity and tension. Weights, platforms, openings, familial histories, water, mud, and knotted lines of a 14k gold alloy, all meet each other through personal and communal labors. This is important to Sandoval de Leon’s practice, as he works closely with a team of artisans and friends in the development of his works associative characteristics. One could say that his work considers how freedom is embodied in a relatable domestic noise; constantly in flux leaving a marked sense of the uncanny. 

In a room, a bulletproof window lays parallel to the ground, perforated methodically, building a grid of attempts to enter and to stop, just at the vortex of tension. A weaving, of sorts, takes place on top of this bulletproof surface through an alloy of 14k gold zigzagging trajectories, defining what looks like a constant current, or a long wave. There’s penetrability and gold, two main ghosts that cross each other, on a hard blanket that is a window. This bulletproof Plexiglas window was an expensive and once-necessary object picked up in Brooklyn, and handled, facing its toxicity in a trance-like action of perforation while linking experiences and ideas. (Via a drill, lava beads placed on a rhythmic pattern, and the aforementioned golden wire). 

In other works, bricks from housing developments, that are currently being revamped in Brooklyn, were exchanged and reformatted into mini-bricks to signal their context, provenance and new tasks. Those tasks float around the notions of process and evaluation, hovering over the policing of bureaucracy, power and intention/tension. In these objects, the embodiment of freedom seems to project itself, configuring different architectures and establishing them, poetically. These bricks, mud, wood, are all homes that are never completely fixed. They emerge as materializations of houses built by animals, by people, or nature. Or as self-portraits, shaped by context as an oppressive force, which in turned is being confronted and transformed by a poetic and yet, policing gaze. 

Sandoval de Leon’s work, as expressed through objects and installation is carefully worded in his statement which reads:“ I’m going to try and map out the shape of unseen activity to give better understanding where flat lines lie. I want to do this, using ideas of portraiture, combining them with ritualistic operations/notions. This theoretical space that shapes the physical world is much of what has inspired 20 20.” 

Carlos Sandoval de Leon was born in Mexico. He received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Columbia University. He has exhibited his works at The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; The Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City; El Museo del Barrio, New York; TERRI AND DONNA, Miami; Mendes Wood DM gallery, Sao Paulo; among other places.

www.centralfine.com, central@centralfine.com. 1224- 1226 Normandy Dr. Miami Beach, Fl, 33141 Tel: +1917-326-1218

Don’t Get Me Wrong[i]
DIEGO SINGH CENTRAL FINE MAY 12-JULY 15, 2018

OPENING Saturday May 12 from 4-10 PM.

I had a dream where I was about to drown, and the scene was filled with anthems, light, pop songs, repressed texts, signs, crooked hats, rigid smiles, sketchy dots, cats wearing boots, etc.
People fell from the sky into the ocean while phosphorescent animals gathered around, ready to eat them.

A W appears at the beginning of Wall or Water. After emerging from immersion, Language can be spoken ‘normally’, building a NNNO, a YYYEs, paintings, universities, books, songs, and walks. Today we see that Language needs to speak and read itself constantly. As Language re-reads its failings, protests against Language emerge.

Without this act of Language looking at itself, we see more of the same: Slogans showing up and syntheses appearing everywhere, which turn into cartoons/simplifications that aim to erase subjectivity, shaping the monstrous.
Right now we are in the midst of The Time of the Cartoon, the moment of the monstrous, and censorship. What’s next? The Time Of Invention, that which is uncertain, nerve wracking and very clear. As All fails, one can invent how to short-circuit prescriptions and move on. Can one speak underwater?

(.......)

When speaking underwater -I’ve attempted that- eyes are clouded by bubbles, emotion and control. All becomes ‘abstracted’. At that moment one wonders: Is Abstraction a Semblance? Language? Reality? One gasps and sound becomes a uuuhhwwhhwwwggglllugghhw, and perhaps that’s the way one talks everyday?

(Crickets)

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

This is Diego Singh’s first solo exhibition in Miami since 2015, when he presented ‘Business Meeting With Dry Ear’ a solo, and yet, dual presentation with Georgia Sagri at CENTRAL FINE.

This exhibition addresses the image of abstraction and how the shapeless and decentralized appears as a threatening face. Singh’s paintings are planes where his reality/signs are repressed and regrouped politically, poetically and psychologically.

Born in Argentina during the last years of the Military Dictatorship that censored and killed 30,000 people, making them ‘disappear’ (These victims are called Los Desaparecidos, The Disappeared ones), Singh’s work addresses the notion of abstraction, politics, control, authority repression, what returns, obliquely watching and talking.

His work considers abstraction, its image and its implications, as something that emerges from experience and that is charged with the political (As noted by Andrea Elias’ text in ‘Because I Like Beginnings’ included in Table for One, a monograph on Singh’s work published in 2011[ii]). Military hats, neon signs, repressed words, skewed texts, have appeared as codes in his body of work, pointing to the authority, monstrosity, and power of language.

The exhibition brings together the ‘Perfect Paintings’, a group of works where representations of abstracted glowing lines/neon signs showed up in 2010, along with the ‘Line Paintings’ started in 2004, which emphasize slowing down while re-presenting, with oil paint, ball-point look-a-like images. ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ will also include the “Keeping Score Paintings”, a series that evolved from his 2012 Captcha series. The “Keeping Scores Paintings” present music scores ( which belong to anthems, religious, protest, and pop songs) veiled, filtered, overlapped and warped until their meaning is challenged, addressing painting’s as a repressed, living, and destabilizing medium.

‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ presents a series of works that analyze Painting as a language, while observing language. The notion of Lalangue[iii], formulated by Jacques Lacan, is central here: Lalangue is a pre-verbal stage of language that is universal and personal, and as maternal waters, or tongues go, Lalangue/Painting, could both nourish or drown us.

Diego Singh was born in Argentina. His work was exhibited at: The De La Cruz Collection, Miami; MOCA San Diego; PAMM, Miami; The Fondazzione Malvina Menegas; Castelbasso, Italy; Braverman Gallery, Tel- Aviv; Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo; The Palazzo Fruscione, Salerno, Italy; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Galleria Macca, Sardegna; the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; among other places. He will hold a solo exhibition at HYLE, Athens.

He founded CENTRAL FINE in 2012, an artist-run-space in Miami Beach following the notion of the empty mask, the ideal role of the analyst, where people can upload content.

Notes
[i] Don’t Get Me Wrong, " is a song composed by Chrissie Hynde and released by the pop-rock group The Pretenders. It was the first single taken from the group's 1986 album, Get Close.

Lyrics:

Don't get me wrong
If I'm looking kind of dazzled I see neon lights
Whenever you walk by

Don't get me wrong
If you say hello and I take a ride Upon a sea where the mystic moon Is playing havoc with the tide

Don't get me wrong
if I'm acting so distracted
I'm thinking about the fireworks that go off when you smile

Don't get me wrong
If I split like light refracted I'm only off to wander Across a moonlit mile

Once in a while, two people meet
Seemingly for no reason, they just pass on the street Suddenly, thunder showers everywhere
Who can explain the thunder and rain?
But there's something in the air

Don't get me wrong
If I come and go like fashion I might be great tomorrow But hopeless yesterday

Don't get me wrong
If I fall in the mode of fashion It might be unbelievable
But let's not say so long
It might just be fantastic Don't get me wrong

[ii] Elias, Andrea, ‘Because I like Beginnings’, published in Table For One, a monograph on Diego Singh’s work, by Tomio Koyama Gallery, Mendes Wood, Old Hand Office, 2011.

[iii] Lalangue: a term coined by Jacques Lacan, which is defined as speech prior to grammatical or lexicographical organization. Lalangue is speech in its disjunction from the structure of language. Outside of grammar, housing in its holes, rumors and murmurs, it is the very site where desire is directed. The term is approached here as situated outside The Father, coexisting with the Oceanic Feeling, making it a personal and yet, commonly shared experience. That said, Lalangue is unique to each subject.

CENTRAL FINE

Myrlande Constant

Curated by Tomm El-Saieh

March 21 –April 20, 2018

Opening March 21 6-10 PM

Within the Vodou community the flag is a sacred ritual object that identifies the hounfour and honors the spirits with whom it is associated. The sparkle of the sequin or mirror used to capture the attention of the Iwa started in the temples. Drapo Voudou (sequined sacred flags) are unfurled at the beginning of a ceremony. They are power points that are used for both identification and transformation. When the flag is unfurled it signals the congregants to come to order -the sacred is about to come home to roost. The spirits will soon walk next to (or in) the market woman.[1]
Myrlande Constant works in her studio/home, which is located on top of a hill, surrounded by glass-less windows, this is, perhaps, the perfect setting for her flags, which undulate as the wind makes its way into the rooms.
 

Myrlande Constant worked in a wedding dress factory with her mother. After her employers didn’t pay her for her labor, she opposed them and left her job, taking as a severance pay bags with beads and knowledge. She used the sewing and beading skills learned at the factory (The technique used there is called tambour and was developed in France) and started working on her flags.   As a result of those situations, in the early 1990’s, Myrlande Constant became the first woman in Haiti to apply the tambour technique in her work, which could be seen as a re-consideration of the making of traditional Voudou flags. moreover, the use of the tambour as a way of building her work, which populated her flags with what at the time were considered as feminine adornments, charged her work with gender.

In her works, Constant draws in the back of stretched fabric onto wood while the beading process, what would become the front of the flag, is being formed on the reversed side. Myrlande works through intuition, as she doesn’t see the finished work until the backside has been completed. An artwork that resembles a Voudou flag that isn’t seen until it is completed becomes an object worked on from the threshold of the visible. This is a symbol that signifies dualities, syncretism, a belief system, a religion, and a stand-in for those notions, all of which are developed, somehow, almost blindly.

Women, Columns, Names, and Flags

The saying  ‘The Potomitan[ii] is the woman, the mother, the courage of the family, that, which supports the foundations of her universe” (“Le potomitan est la femme, la mère «courage» de famille qui supporte tel un pilier les fondements de son universe” ) correlates women and the omnipresent column standing in a Vudoud temple, considering them both as centers and connectors. In Constant’s work, a type of connector, or, Potomitan appears as a unifying element: Her last name.
The name Constant, which is usually sewn in large and contrasting letters becomes a signifier that runs through various scenes as a constant presence, intervening the narratives of the Lwas[iii]. Constant includes herself in her scenes, beading a self-portrait of sorts, surrounded by her reality. This act of naming and charging her works with her last name brings into focus her viewpoint into the Voudou ceremonies, offerings, narratives, and the Lwas’ roles as projections that live within our realm.

In a work, she presents naked women on top of horses -these are the deities, riding,
mounting people- or figures wearing sun glasses drinking from bottles, nex t to skulls and penises, where the ceremonial overlaps with the quotidian, and time is addressed as a sum of temporalities while representations interact with each other, developing narratives where sexuality, politics and religion enter the space of naming and law.

This is a law that is crossed by the subjective and is always defying temporal vectors, as it happens in magic. Furthermore, in what we call magic –this also can be applied to the term tradition- what remains as unrealized, or unfulfilled, opens paths where one’s (Constant) naming can actualize historical and personal truths, as well as non-academic but highly categorized types of knowledge, as it is the case in Constant’s work.  

Myrlande Constant’s praxis, then, presents knowledge and representations that address the space of the invisible, expanding the repertoire of faces given to the Lwas in Voudou. Hector Hyppolite was the first artist to give faces to the Lwas, Andre Pierre followed up on the task, and now Constant is shaping and presenting their faces and actions, from a woman’s perspective, working in Port-au-Prince, sewing blindly, from the reverse side of planes, extrapolating techniques to re-address institutionalized ways of approaching highly codified objects and signs. 

Color, Anger, Prohibition

In Voudou, the Rada Lwas originated in Africa and are considered, generally, as benevolent and associated with the color white. The Petro Lwa appeared in Haiti, and in contrast, are aggressive and associated with the color red. The Ghede lwa address death and carnality, perform dances, mimic sexual intercourse, and behave irreverently. Their color is black. The Rada Lwas then, associated with the white color, traditionally point towards pre-slavery before the occupation of the symbolic by imperialistic domination. After the Haitian Revolution those deities developed a dark side, signaling anger and oppression, or what appears as another side to their roles. Those roles break through from the religious space into the real as unified totalities. This unification also signals syncretism’s embracing of Catholic Saints, and the merging with their African counterparts, as well as the political dynamics present in Haiti’s history. (Of note, as mentioned earlier, in the work of Myrlande Constant, this merging, is also evident in the technical aspect of beading the French technique called tambourine, used for another type of ceremonial garment, the wedding dress, which in turn, re-defines ceremonial Voudou Flags.)

Color in Vodou is codified and the relationships established are clear: The dark side of Erzulie Freda is Erzulie Dantor, and cannot -or should not- share the same space with the white side of that Lwa. Their coexistence, although both form the same entity, could generate a type of friction in the realm of the symbolic, unleashing a clash, with repercussions, via the magical, into reality.  

In Voudou, chromatic relationships carry within them functions and tasks. Each Lwa is invoked by a certain veve[iv], they are served certain offerings, shown specific colors, objects, food, chants and drumbeats. The veve, (A sign) used in a ceremony is dependent upon the Lwa whose presence is invoked. If an artwork has a veve in it, it could posses its owner, and if certain deities interact in an artwork, their colors should be considered thoroughly by the artist. Therefore a dual training is required when addressing Voudou in art: Not only a formal training is needed, but also an initiation into the religion and its rules, which must be observed as they could impact reality directly, immediately.

In Constant’s work, and moving beyond the traditional appearance of beaded flags and their roles, an approximation, questioning and an unleashing of traditional formats takes place. These operations make evident that a distancing from the didactic and the illustrative is emphasized, as her flags present encounters between the mythical and contemporary issues such as earthquakes, women’s role, social upheaval, sexuality, etc.- We should also note that materially, due to the tambour technique, Constant’s work is too stiff to be consider a flag, further separating them from traditional ceremonial flags.

If we consider self-portraiture, blindness, flags, syncretism, sex, religion, names, etc.- we see them all, captured in Myrlande Constant flags, shining and moving in her studio. Hers is a praxis open to the outside, released through the feminine gaze from the male-dominated institutions that have instrumentalized naming, religion, art, labor, traditions and roles, constantly, until now.

 Diego Singh, Haiti, 2015---Miami, 2018

[1] Josephson, Nancy: Spirits in Sequins, Voudou flags in Haiti. Pp. 15,  Schiffer Publisher, 2007

[ii] Lwas: They are the Mysteries, or the Invisible Ones In Haitian Voudou. They act as links between God and humans. The Lwas are served respecting their culinary, chromatic and sacrificial preferences, and because of these set of specificities, they differ from Saints, and can be understood as something else, as projections, or entities that act as shadows or amplifications.The Lowa were syncretized with the Catholic Saints by the Fon and the Iwi, and in some cases Catholic Saints have become Loa, being this the case of John The Baptist.

[iii] Potomitan is a pole present in Voudou temples, placed in the center acting as a link between the realms.

[iv] Veve are signs used to address and invoke certan Iwas during Voudou Ceremonies. 

A veve is usually drawn on the floor by strewing a powder-like substance, commonly cornmeal, wheat flour, bark, red brick powder, or gunpowder, and the material depends entirely upon the ritual. In Haitian Vodou, a mixture of cornmeal and wood ash is used.

Jesus Casimiro

February 25- March 20.

Opening reception, Sunday February 25th, 6-10 PM

Introduction

In Latin America the Quechuas[1] amount to 10-12 million people. Their language originated in the 5th Century in the center and West areas of what is now Peru. By the 15th century, the Lengua General  (General Tongue, the denomination given to the dominant spoken Quechua) was established as the official language in the Inca Empire.

The Quechua language lacks an original written archive and its contemporary structure has been impacted by a myriad of changes, variations, repressions, prohibitions and linguistic mergings (mainly with Spanish and Latin).

The first accounts of attempting to establish a written register of the Quechua language date from 1540 by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas a Spanish priest. His writings on ‘Quechua’ relied on the Latin alphabet and attempted, through phonetic transcriptions, to map a written archive, or rather, attempt a translation of the language. He published his Grammatica o Arte de la Lengua General de los Indios de los Reynos del Perú (Grammar or Art of the General Language of the Indians of the Royalty of Peru) in 1560.

In 1608 Diego Gonzalez Holguin published the Vocabvlario de la lengua general de todo el Peru Llamada Quichua o del Inca, written in Spanish, attempting, again to translate and capture the rich nature of Quechua language. [2] 

In 1975 Peru became the first country to recognize Quechua as one of its official languages. Ecuador conferred official status on the language in its 2006 Constitution, and in 2009, Bolivia adopted a new Constitution that recognized Quechua and several other indigenous languages as official languages of the country. The major obstacle to the usage and teaching of Quechua is the lack of written materials in that language, such as books, newspapers, software, and magazines. The Bible has been translated into Quechua and is distributed by certain missionary groups. Quechua, along with Aymara and other minor indigenous languages, remains essentially a spoken language.

In this text and exhibition we will deal, yet again, as we usually do at CENTRAL FINE, with the power of language, its impotence, its dictatorial tendencies and its capacity to elude and embrace itself. We will approach Language’s oppression, abstraction and fluidity.  We will also observe, although briefly, the Quechua language’s potential to convey tactility, as well as its capacity to bypass imperialistic notions of grammar, readings and their suffocating borders.

Jesus Casimiro

 Jesus Casimiro’s textiles are made by a self-devised weaving technique called Cateña that alludes to Luracatao [3], his birth-town. The people in Luracatao are called Cateños, which imbues Casimiro’s weaving approach with a societal texture.

As mentioned earlier, the Quechua language lacks a unified and autonomous written archive and as such has relied mainly on oral transmission and a codification of phonetics, grammatical structures, patterns, weaving techniques, symbolism, world views, and what appears to be or look like ‘abstraction’ for it’s preservation and dissemination. 

A key aspect in this exhibition is the role of color in the Quechua language and traditions. Color has been codified and charged, specifically, in a way that conveys a vast array of associations, concepts, ideas. Put together this way colors can, and do, narrate stories.

Let’s take a look at this: The Quechua spoken in Salta (Argentina) differs from the Quechua spoken in Jujuy (Argentina), Peru, Bolivia, etc. What these variations share is an attempt at codifying society and nature through practices, what we call art, forms, colors, symbols, visual patterns and the mythological. In short: In th arts, abstract signs are preserved by the Quechuas as means of livelihood, communication, integration, and preservation of the identity of an oppressed and silenced group of people.

Such abstractions, far from being part of the ‘empty signs of abstraction’ or mere formalism, will show up in patterns, ceramic objects, choice of materials, as ways to comprehend the symbolic, the imaginary and the real as one.

Casimiro’s body of work takes on the tradition of Quechua textiles and moves through its parameters weaving a personal approach that distances itself from what we understand as craft. This way it enters, perhaps, what we call contemporary art, and in that resistance to the stratification of tradition, his praxis meet what we could see as opt-art, abstraction, etc. His weaving technique, (Devised and developed by Casimiro, and furthermore, named by the artist as Cateña, as mentioned earlier), deals with political, sociological, historical and religious problems.

His work, then, touches on the notion of Origin, the Original, etc. How? Well, the word of his invented weaving process refers to the name given to the people born in his native Luracatao. There are Casimiro's origins at stake here as well as the original ways of ancestral traditions in textile-making. Or the invention of one’ weaving, of one’s intersection within a sum of political and social knots and fibers.

Determined by color and its associations, Casimiro organizes his textiles in a chromatic lexicon pertinent to the Quechua culture, establishing linguistic relationships: In the symbolism and the codification of color in Quechua textiles, Red embodies a type of wisdom that is self-evident to the eye and a lack of red indicates times of peace. Green will point to agriculture, fauna, flora, and the contact with the Mother Earth or Pacha Mama, and so forth.

White signals a type of intellectual labor, clarity of observation, a type of serene objectivity and the base of reality. Black stands for Time, Purple stands for Social Organization (Ayllu).

Casimiro’s works tell an “unwritten” story through pattern and color, while remaining specific and open-ended. His are abstract textiles built on a codification of color that could be read by the Quechuas. To us, they remain sustained in themselves, communicating a sum of associations vastly different from the stories they carry.

In Rio a bulging Black, blue and red textile, form undulates as a River. This river, with its red knots, is a sick river, running through time, indicating pollution as blood, and its impact on agriculture, as explained by Casimiro. 

In Kenko, we see a 3d woven pattern that represents the trajectory of routes surrounding the mountains in Salta, Argentina. Those paths, with their sharp quebradas (Breakages) are the routes that the Quechuas must walk in order to work, or to return home after work. This is a story narrated in lines of color, implying the sun, the topography of mountains, labor, etc.

In Paisaje Telurico, (Telluric Landscape) a free standing textile is pierced by threads of colored wool coming down from the ceiling, as rays that cross what looks like a group of valleys and mountains, which in turn, expands itself into the floor. This landscape is seen floating between the ground and the sky, sustained by the codification of color and threads, knotted in a chain of associations that point to a continuum of signifiers.

This is key to understand the Quechua point of view: What we call the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are all interconnected and unified in a thread that considers them, all, as one. 

Casimiro’s body of work presents the body of language under the oppressive force of dominant bodies, tongues and grammatical structures. His textiles are constructions and planes of resistance that, through the use of what we read as abstraction, provide avenues for sustaining themselves in a poetic space that is an actor, a witness and an archive to a worldview by a large and silenced group of people. This ‘silence’ is cryptic (to us) and yet vibrant, defiant, charged by symbols, labor, mythologies. This ‘silence’ exists as protest, as tradition, as a Chaya,[4] manifesting what survives and thrives as a speech that is alive, changing, unwritten, permeable, and clear.

Diego Singh, Miami, 2018.

Jesus Casimiro was born in 1968 in Luracatao, Salta, Argentina. His works have been presented widely in Argentina and abroad, and he is considered to be one of the great textile artists in the country. A selection of his numerous institutional exhibitions include: Pushka in Time, at the Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires; Latin American Textile Artists, Museo Nacional de Etnografia, La Paz, Bolivia, etc. Casimiro's textiles have been shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes, House of Arias Rengell, Salta; the Museo Latinoamericano, Salta among others.

He has been awarded the prestigious Acquisition Prize at the National Biennial of Textile Artists in Argentina and has been selected as the awardee in the exhibition Contemporary Art and Textiles at the Museo Nacional de Etnografia in La Paz, Bolivia.

Casimiro has been a Juror for the Textile Arts Awards the Auchan Center in Lille, France.

He will present on March 7th, a publication on his work titled Arte Calchaqui, in conjunction with the exhibition Escultura Mutante at the department of Cultural Affairs at la Casa de Salta in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is his first solo exhibition in the United Sates and the first at CENTRAL FINE.

Notes

[1] Quechua:  (/ˈkɛtʃuə/, in AmE also /ˈkɛtʃwɑː/)[4], known as Runasimi ("people's language"). The Quechuan language, is an indigenous language family, with variations spoken by the Quechuas primarily living in the Andes and highlands of South America. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widely spoken language of indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of some 10-12 million speakers.  Approximately 25% (7.7 million) of Peruvians speak some variation of Quechua. It is perhaps most widely known for being the main language of the Inca Empire. The colonisers initially encouraged its use, but from the middle of their reign they suppressed it. However, Quechua ultimately survived, and variants are still widely spoken today.

[2] Gonzalez Holguin, Diego: Vocabvlario de la lengua general de todo el Perv llamada qquichua o del Inca.  See dowloadable PDF here: http://www.memoriachilena.cl/archivos2/pdfs/MC0033185.pdf

[3] Luracatao: A village and rural municipality in the Salta Province in northwestern Argentina.

[4] Chaya: The Chaya implies a strong reaction against imperialistic tendencies, aiming to protest and to preserve marginalized cultural manifestations. Traditionally, the Chaya, is delivered as a protest in an oblique way: By poeticizing nature, financial need, or addressing imperialistic abuse and racism, political issues are expressed via the camouflage of the voice and music, in songs, in the northwest of Argentina.

CENTRAL FINE

 
CHRISTOPH WESTERMEIER  ‘INSIDE THE BRICK’
January 14-February 23, 2018.  Opening Sunday Jan .14, 5-8 PM
 
CENTRAL FINE presents Inside the Brick by Christoph Westermeier. This is his first solo exhibition at CF, and his second presentation in Miami Beach, after a one-night performance at Between Arrival and Departure in 2017.
The works at CENTRAL FINE bring to mind a mise en abyme, reflecting images within images, at once hermetic and generic, defined by cuts and filters; as if entering the multiple structures of a nightmare, where perception swallows itself, blind and deaf, full of ID.
This is a dangerous dream and Westermeier walks and walls us through it, signaling the abyss of the brick, its depth, and our tendency to self-exile and isolation. Perhaps the liquidity of the brick (Like the liquidity of the word, or the eye) solidifies blinding masks that indicate simultaneous temporalities and shape-shifting facades.
Pockets, legs, pillows, doors, green malachite, the brick on a maligned intimacy, and the immersion into what sketches power and its structures; are all called upon in a poetic move, carving out a tiny hole?
 
In Italics, a text by Christoph Westermeier:
 
'Inside The Brick' stands for a discussion between a Flâneur and objects in a Potemkin village.
The Flâneur is detached from time and space and walks secluded on a horizontal line. He is in close contact with Siegfried Kracauer, W. G. Seblad and Daphne Du Maurier. His points of reference are the objects he encounters, which he sees as accomplices on his tours. In these objects the Flâneur finds friends who help him to enter society: An ashtray is his ticket to a late roman banquet as well as his constant companion on cruising tours through Vatican city or a handy helper in Napoleon III Second Empire.
Power structures are the counterparts the Flâneur has to deal with. While his true friend Jean Des Esseintes (“À Rebours”, Joris-Karl Huysmans) turned away from reality, the Flâneur made a deal with power structures: Realizing that rational organs experience his dialogue with objects only as a monologue he moved on to a Potemkin village. In this illusory world the insides of bricks have the same narrative power as paintings by Niele Toroni. While power structures keep vertical control of this construction, the Flâneur remains on his horizontal tour, talking to paper, walking through a propaganda show by El Lissitzky and listening to Shostakovich music.
 
Christoph Westermeier, Dusseldorf, 2017-2018.

Christoph Westermeier was born in Cologne in 1984. He Studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf / Academy of Fine 2004-2010 Arts in Dusseldorf. (From 2004-2008 with Prof.Thomas Ruff and Benjamin Katz/Albrecht Fuchs; 2008-2010 with Prof. Rita McBride and Prof. Christopher Williams, Masterstudent of Prof. Christopher Williams in 2009). He attended De Ateliers in Amsterdam from 2011 until 2013.

Westermeier was awarded the Moskau Residency, MultiMedia Art MuseumMoskau; Schloss Ringenberg residency, Istanbul residency, Kunststiftung NRW; Förderpreis NRW; Working grant Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn, dHCS Scholarship, Kunstverein Dusseldorf; and the Peter-Mertes-Scholarship, Kunstverein Bonn.

He has held solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Bonn, Bonn; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf ; Thebaïs, Cologne;  Between Arrival & Departure, Miami Beach; Kunststiftung NRW, Istanbul; Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam; Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, among others.
 
Westermeier held group exhibitions and performances at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, with E. Hermann, A. Pöhlmann, F. Rohden Düsseldorf; Villa Romana, Florence; and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf; among others. 
    

www.centralfine.com, central@centralfine.com 1226 Normandy Dr. Miami Beach, Fl, 33141, +917-306-1218

CENTRAL FINE

VIKTOR EL-SAIEH

THE  DIZZINESS

October 22-November 21, 2017

Opening Sunday, 22nd, 7-10 PM

The ground is here and Panic & Anxiety dance around, freezing arms and legs, preparing us to fight...When one faints, wings have grown and our 'upper bodies' have morphed into lions, tigers, and bears--who fly.

Viktor El Saieh presents paintings where various subjects of worship, from the iconic idea to the spiritual figure, live in a state of...

His paintings attest to a certain solidarity between the feral, the poetic and the human. The character's actions are silent, apparitions are themselves, while planes of color and negative spaces (Fighting each other out) amplify a vitraux.

Anxiety defines us through conflict, in-forming us; and when facing it, we come to terms with oppression, violence and choice, grasping how this meeting morphs us into versions.

The Dizziness that El-Saieh talks about, is, in his words: "An attempt at understanding the relationship between folklore and culture through the lens of mythology and its potential application in daily life."

He ads "I try to highlight the commonality of the human experience as a way into myself...Maybe my background has led me to tap into a plane where the mythological is the breeding ground for a tendency toward hyper-subjectivity and infinite possibility, and everything is probable, in the sense that everything has already happened, much like in a dream — but devoid of emotion. Every scenario you might ever imagine has already taken place and the outcomes are immune to any sort of outlook, which leads to a type of neutrality."

Building on the artist's previous body of work which examined, in depth, the narrative of a very particular figure in Haitian political-mythology called Chaloska1, these paintings seek to address the notion of the individual, and the value of the symbolic, right now, when choice is abundant and incredibly limited. By taking as a given that every discourse is poiesis, El-Saieh can cross thresholds and categorization, touching their stratification.

Viktor El-Saieh actively trespasses some mainstream perceptions of history when suggesting an alternative, as if he says 'I am not what I am' 2; looking at 'The Contemporary' and facing his, and Painting's potency as well as shared patterns of anticipatory anxiety.

Notes:

1.-Chaloska: a political/military figure from the early 1900s infamous for murdering political prisoners and immortalized as a sinister carnival character with a large red mouth.

2.- Borges, Jorge Luis: 'Everything and Nothing' short story in "Fictions"; translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1999.

CENTRAL FINE

 Kyle Chapman

SHREDDER

Sept 24 – October 20 2017. Opening Sept 24, 6-10 PM

 There’s a movie I cannot remember, that comes back as a sensation. I wonder if we can send an open invitation and ask what movie it is.  (I’m worried about my memory. There’s very little timeline there.) Basically, I have an image of a creator doing something and simultaneously there’s another character undoing the same thing the first is making. Both figures unknown to each other, focused on their task, their actions work inversely toward each other, building toward their own ends, and at the same time negating each other.

 The characters in the movie you can't remember bring to mind the Demiurge1. The son of Sophia, (Knowledge) emerges as a creator, translating into the realm of the material the world of ideas. He acts like a distorting mirror, blind, monstrous, some views considered him Evil. Just like surveillance mirrors, he is seen as a distorter figure, but also as a creator, an artist, an interpreter.

The title, Shredder invokes Him, since the Demiurge is driven by, or it is the ID itself, passive aggressively reflecting and producing, unaware of his task. Pure Pulsion and Act. And as translations go, what the Demiurge reflects, is flawed, but that flaw is the surplus.  We can also think about the Lacanian task of doing and working with the excision that castration brings. Reality warped by it, bending us and, in that space of ‘lacking’ we find the emphasis on links that you talk about.  We  are a ‘lack’, and that void is the link between A-B-C. The excision becomes our material in itself, and an agent.

 Love the idea of working alone, unmonitored, ignorant of everything else, even the mother.

Well, we end up with the Divine Triumvirate of the 3 C’s (The Creator, The Creature and The Created). The Shredder/Mirror/Artist/ID/ Demiurge can be thought of as the 3C’s. --In these bulging ideas we always find the pregnancy of dots. There are toothed mouths/stomachs shining on the walls of the Bay Supermarket around the corner, an office, condo, etc. One looks invariably fatter there, improved.

 In this exhibition your work performs a type of self-effacement. These surfaces are inscribed with random paragraphs, with shapes that look like graffiti, bringing the outside (the graffiti) into the private sphere of the mirror, changing the scale of the writing on the wall, re-presenting that sign, and in turn, occluding the gaze and the reflected. Mirrors without the other are objects that are dis-annexed, leeching on whatever, needy and passive-aggressive.

 When we talk about your memory loss, are we talking about a generational issue or the early onset of dementia?

I’m worried. People don’t remember much anymore, you can search the web for what doesn’t make the cut of memory. We can crowd-source memory and ask the other to fill in the blanks.  The more we can do this, the less we remember, obviously.

 Perhaps because of the title of the exhibition, each mark you've made is shredding what emerges as language. One encounters a running line that stifles the democracy of reflections (Or the lack of both). And whatever comes forward becomes noise, obstruction: A sign unleashed, unraveling beyond grammar, beyond language itself and becoming a thing. Or perhaps we meet in these surfaces, that are links and limits, an omnipresent mother regulating it all (Sophia), pregnant with the Demiurge. Delivering what reflects and distorts you. Sporting a reflecting belly, utterly charged with whatever crosses them.

 Yes, the etching reduces that reflection by degrees with each marking; so, the reflection is reduced incrementally through the hand. By degrees, I insist here, as these mirrors have a 160 degree field of view. They are and have a gloved sight, (Enveloped, covered) they close-in on The Filter. The audience adds something to that experience but the mirrors and the sculpture ‘chew’ away that input.

The mark/division becomes clear and concrete, fraying the reflection, opening a wound. Anything put in front of these works will not be rendered intact. This halving of the gaze cannot be held in documentation: We can’t photograph or film or pause these encounters or what they bring forward, this is a machine, precarious, and over-determined.  

Here is Repression

(In Italics, Kyle Chapman)

July 14th, 2017

 Kyle Chapman was born in South Africa. He studied at the Kansas City Arts Institute, Fiber Arts, and at New World School of the Arts. His solo project'Channel' is currently on view at the Bass Museum Of Art's Temporary Contemporary Program, in partnership with Walgreens, at 2300 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL, 33140. This is his second solo exhibition at CENTRAL FINE.

1: Demiurge; One Gnostic mythos refers to him as the son of Sophia (Wisdom/Knowledge). In Platonic, Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean the Demiurge is an artisan/like figure responsible for the fashioning of the universe. We are interested in the tension that the Gnostic approach to the term presents; as the Demiurge is considered as antagonistic to the will of the Supreme Being. His act of creation occurs in an unconscious way, flawed. The Demiurge is then, a solution to the problem of Evil , since he is the creator of a separation, of versions or of a reflection that is unleashed from its source.

ANDRE PIERRE

Dec 3- March 30 2017

Opening December 3rd, 7-9 PM

1226 NORMANDY DRIVE, MIAMI BEACH, FL, 33141

Central Fine presents an exhibition of paintings by Andre Pierre, curated by Tomm El-Saieh and Diego Singh.  On view there will be a selection of historical works that aims to further the conversation on the place where The Symbolic, The Imaginary and The Real, meet.

Andre Pierre was born in Port Au Prince in 1916.  An anecdote told by Emmanuel El-Saieh narrates a traumatic moment, or perhaps an epiphany: Pierre wrestled from a pig a piece of sugarcane to feed himself. This moment underlines an engagement with his own drive and the animal’s, and perhaps could be thought of as the Lacanian “Lightning”, where things become clear and actualized in consciousness, as if by lightning; ultimately modifying one's life. Shortly after, Pierre became a farmer, a painter and a voodoo priest, and perhaps understood the site where the human, hunger, and the divine merge; through libidinal sublimation. 

His first steps into painting took place within the voodoo temples as his early works were painted in the gourds used to contain the offerings/feedings/sacrifices to the Loa[1].  These works were seen by Maya Deren [2] who introduced him to the Centre d’Art in the late 40’s, and following her suggestion, Pierre began painting on canvas and board which perhaps indicates a passage from the devotional nature of his practice to a market conscious output.

When approaching Pierre’s works we encounter the narratives that are embodied by deities, for a lack of better word, or what is brought forward as they cut through the threshold of 'The Real'.  In one work, a mermaid-like figure (La Sirene) is seen as a sign announcing a flood, a political scene and a fight. The painting acts as an incantation where the artist conjures a spell, piercing a veil; presenting a work that acts as a rite and a representation. (This twofold aspect indicates the shared nature of representation and the ritual: Both invoke and re-attach, through form and language, the real and the symbolic.) When considering these works, one wonders if Pierre saw the religious and the political as the same.

Going back to the Loas, it’s important to understand that the Loa aren’t deities per-se, but rather can be understood as shadows, or projections broadcasting their qualities onto this plane. These projections interact with humans, embodying virtues, tasks, and desire. The priest, like the painter, is perhaps the manager of both realms, re-linking them. This is key to understand Andre Pierre’s work: Through Painting he brought forward the avatars of the divine into the reality of Haiti and its political landscape, confusing them and populating the shrine and the battlefield with metaphors and spells.

Andre Pierre’s reality was informed and formed by Voodoo, and what we see in his paintings is an interaction between “The Symbolic” and “The Imaginary” (Representation and language) through re-presentations that shape his painting practice and his work as a priest.

The ‘Passage to Act’, and to the act of painting, in Pierre’s work evolves into a moment where the symbolic realm is that which informs, while becoming an image, a reality.This circular relationship is often addressed when talking about magical thinking. 

The tendency towards a trafficking of signs, towards repetition and codification present in Haitian painting and on Pierre's works, seem to address not only formal tactics and traditions, but also the tempo that defines a trance and a rite, and it is such rhythm,  the very site where narratives become acts.

What is of interest to me, is that the focus in Pierre’s work appears to reside on Intention, and this is what defines the magician. Pierre, perhaps, experienced intention as a site, and in that 'place' a color will invoke an effect, a spell, or point to a political structure. In the works presented in this exhibition, Andre Pierre’s language and gaze, seem to be delivering a living script that is defined by the very same threshold that this enactment is constantly crossing.

Diego Singh, Miami, October 25, 2016.

Andre Pierre was born in Port Au Prince in 1916, he died in 2005 at his house in Croix-des-Missions. His works focus on the representation of Loa, or deities in the voodoo pantheon. He painted at the Issa El-Saieh Gallery in Port Au Prince for over 21 years, eventually becoming a Houngan (A male voodoo priest) and dedicating his life to painting and to the presentation of Voodoo as a legitimate religion. He is considered one of Haiti’s most significant painters, and a successor of Hector Hippolite, as a major painter of The Loa. His work was exhibited internationally in a number of Museums,  most recently at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and the El-Saieh Gallery in Port Au Prince.

CENTRAL FINE thanks Tomm El-Saieh, Sharona Nathan El-Saieh  and Emmanuel El-Saieh for their guidance on this exhibition. 

[1] -Loa:  The mysteries, or the invisibles in Haitian Voodoo. They act as links between God and Man. Unlike Catholic Saints they are served, and not only revered, offering, food, sacrifices and respecting their culinary or chromatic preferences.  As such, they are close to humans, and perhaps can be understood as projections. The Loa were syncretized with the Catholic Saints by the Fon and the Iwi and in some instances Catholic Saints have become Loa, being this the case of John the Baptist.

[2] The Centre D’Art was founded in 1944 in Port-Au-Prince, it has been an educational center and a reference for the presentation of Haitian Art. In January 12, 2010, the Centre’s building collapsed, and after his Director’s death remained closed until 2014. The Center is currently open.

Viktor El-Saieh Tet Chat/Cat’s Head

“Charles Oscar Etienne was the head of the national police during the presidency of Vilbrun Guillame Sam who was the 7th president to hold office between the period of 1911-1915. Sam was overthrown and Charles Oscar murdered 150 political prisoners immediately just before he himself was brutally murdered. The US occupation of Haiti soon followed and it would last until 1934. I am not sure when, but eventually Charles Oscar became 'Chaloska' and he emerged as a character in the Haitian Carnival - particularly in the southern town of Jacmel.” 

Viktor El-saieh’s first solo show at CF could perhaps show a painter/dreamer that observes the dramatic act of dreaming/painting.  The painter here is an actor that unfolds into a script-writer, a performer, a narration and a character. Just like in a dream, where there’s no end and no beginning1, the work moves from historical events into poetic re-presentations of what happened through the lens of fiction and commentary.  Tet Chat/Cat’s Head is a slang phrase in Haiti used to describe something unfinished, or in a state of becoming (perhaps something poorly assembled, at risk of falling apart). This precarious assemblage, as it is the case of interpretation and memory, with their gaps, lagoons and parentheses, faces us with painting as an act that interweaves its own history with a vast network of associations (political, poetic, art-historical, etc.-). Moreover, the title points to a relationship to nature, which predominantly appears in Haitian painting, signaling the link between man, myth and nature as a given. 

The question of the painter as a script-director and a career driven politician brings to mind the current state of affairs where paternal figures have fallen and a new type of archetypical sign appears: The Monster appealing to violence, to emotions and the eradication of reason (understanding this as the cliché of seeing reason as an offspring of paternal predominance.) Of note here, and moving beyond the narrative, we see El-Saieh’s works as a series of positions that address Painting’s status through a ‘landscape’. Painting here is acutely aware of its capacity to act as a performative-political text and to embody the drama involved in its making. Painting, like Chaloska, could be an avatar that is sustained in a threshold where its relevance is no longer discussed, where its allegorical, visual and political power imbues every texture and form with the forces that meet on the picture plane.  

Chaloska the agitator, the criminal, is a monstrous footnote in these canvases and embodies what Viktor calls “The capacity for violent explosion that Haiti holds within”. Chaloska, the zombie, preternaturally alive as a recurrent figure in the Haitian carnival, is a medium here, a channel and a quotation on violence that holds a built-in criticism directed towards its core and the conditions that generated it. This can be extrapolated to the state of criticism collapsing into the surface of painting, reflecting on the medium and its pulse as an effect of that meeting. With criticality built-in, Painting, like Chaloska could be a medium kept alive beyond politically driven death-proclamations. This super-charged drama is enacted by a sensitive use of color, the activation of negative spaces and their tension, presenting a mise-en- scène where narration evokes the monstrous and moves beyond nostalgic commemorations, straight into the scene of the painter as a director of relationships and a magnifier of their forces.

Vitktor El-Saieh, born in Port-Au-Prince, 1988. This is his first exhibition at Central Fine Miami Beach. He holds a B.A in International Affairs from the University of Miami, and studied painting at. the Andre Pierre studio in Port Au Prince. His work hasbeen exhibited at Locust Projects, Miami; David Castillo Gallery, Miami; The El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au Prince, among others.

Diego Singh, Miami, May, 2016.

1.- Madonna, Leonard, Patrick: “Like A Prayer”, Like A Prayer, Sire Records, March 3, 1989. 

Jesus Casimiro, Kyle Chapman, Tomm El-Saieh, Maria Quispe

May 21 June 4, OPENING may 22, 4-8 pm

 The car took me into a street where trees merged into a claw becoming one million screens.  Perhaps the liquidity of mirrors calls for something beyond reflections multiplied ad-infinitum and the silver plane is where the engraving of texts, notes and scribbles can signal indelibly scattered thoughts, lists, etc. As if the malleability of the mirror stands for a perfect dictionary, where all thoughts are contained and registered, doubled, and like encyclopedic efforts, carved.

Kyle Chapman’s works engages with what appears to be veiled. In a recent series of engraved mirrors, Chapman tattoos the transparent and manages to double that mark through reflections. It is the act of puncturing the ‘veil’ the one that brings forward an activity focused on itself and on the dissent towards the hyperventilation of self-imposed transparencies, or the reflection’s policing of the self.  The series presented in this exhibition addresses linguistic and narrative interests, drawing, and a journalistic drive; while remaining skeptical of the possibilities that language can afford, relying on the capacity of the mirror to present a constantly shifting ground capturing the work in its totality as an unfixed entity.

Jesus Casimiro’s works seems to point that when a tapestry becomes a text, a codified note about the outside, we can expect a language that is hermetic and soft to the touch. His works emerge and address the Quechua language, a language without a written archive that evolves via visual coding and oral tradition. Following this strong correlation between the linguistic and its material manifestations, his tapestries are made by a self-devised weaving technique called Cateña that alludes to Luracatao, his birth-town. The people in Luracatao are called Cateños, which imbues Casimiro’s weaving approach with a societal texture. Let’s take a look at this tight-knit bond: The Quechua spoken in Salta is markedly different from the spoken Quechua in Jujuy, Peru, Bolivia, etc.  What these dialects share is abstraction and an attempt at codifying society and nature through symbols, visual patterns and the mythological, as the Quechua language lacks any written preservation. Abstract signs are maintained as a means of livelihood, communication, and integration. Such abstraction, far from being part of the ‘empty signs of abstraction’ or paternal formalism, shows up in patterns, ceramic objects, choice of materials; as ways to comprehend the symbolic and the imaginary as the real, as opposed to perceiving them in separate planes.

Casimiro’s works, then, take on the tradition of Quechua textiles and move beyond its parameters, weaving his idiosyncrasy into pop art, opt-art and obsession. Determined by color and its associations, Casimiro organizes his tapestries in a chromatic lexicon establishing meditative relationships: White signals a type of intellectual labor, a clarity of observation, a type of serene objectivity; purple stands for Social Organization (Ayllu); red embodies a type of wisdom that is self-evident to the eye; green will point to agriculture, fauna, flora and the contact with the Mother Earth or Pacha Mama, and so forth. It is as if his tapestries tell an unwritten story through pattern and color, while remaining specific and fluid.

 Maria Quispe’s work addresses not being anywhere and being of the everywhere, acting on isolation in her remote Escoipe in Salta. In her practice, it is as if the songs, newspaper-clips and the political activism that inform her works, become cyphers. One wonders if this political stance towards abstraction is happy with parody or with an actual re-shaping of the political. In her protest poems and songs, Quispe engages in a re-sensitization of the visual through actual dissent.  At the core of her practice is the Chaya1, which usually implies a reaction to imperialistic tendencies and a preservation of marginalized cultural manifestations. Traditionally, the Chaya is delivered as a protest in an oblique way. By poeticizing nature and needs, issues are addressed via the camouflage of the voice and music, which leaves one thinking: ‘Wow, that’s so beautiful’, to then realize what is broken via the violence of progress.

 Tomm El-Saieh’s paintings consider a certain Haitian-ness, rhythmical-all-over abstraction and the political approach that implies a simultaneous engagement/distancing from the perceptions and the pictorial traditions of his country. From his generation, he is Haiti’s first painter addressing High Modernist ideals and its dislocation from his pictorial heritage. Understanding abstraction as a political act is what links his work with Quispe’s work, aesthetically and conceptually.

El Saieh’s work, with it’s associations moving beyond the retinal, bring forward a complex weaving that announce that perhaps in these paintings a filtering takes place, an extraction of what consists the very basic look of Haiti, it’s temperature and vibe remaining latent and potent. El-Saieh perhaps claims a stance in the formless, in the ground that is being developed by his own charting, a ground where tradition, and its castrating impetus is faced by its own cut.

1 Chaya, in this sense Chayar is an act of singing praises to nature, expecting for rain, food, space and peace. It is prevalent in many Diaguita and Quechua populations and is a covert way of protesting imperialism and capitalistic/industrial take over.

SAM LIPP ABANDONMENT

October 11 – November 18

Abandonment in this exhibition is understood in associative layers. To ban is to prohibit, and is also related to banishment, or something cast out. Civic life is in essence defined by its prohibitions. A ban is spatial, a designation within a territory. In a totalitarian-leaning democracy, the experience of having a body is an experience of being necessarily healthy or of being easily erased.

The aromatherapy of hospitals, family offices and shrines all impregnate a self-cannibalistic tendency that amplifies a type of impotence/potency. Here the perfect image of disease is autoimmune. A key aspect of this ‘health’, in its legally required form, is that those motherfuckers still make you pay.

In the exhibition Michael Jackson appears as a sign where The King (basileus) mirrors the Holy basil[1] both being ‘the incomparable one’. The transformation of MJ’s body in his lifetime is also seen as giving the body to the polis, becoming Christ-like: A body transformed and abandoned, a body with a collapsing nose, a body to eat from (Liturgically and through mass-media), a body that is given to us and that, by losing itself, or re-defining itself, keeps us waiting for its return.

This is Sam Lipp’s first exhibition at Central Fine. The exhibition will be followed later this month by a second presentation at Central Fine, Buenos Aires. Sam Lipp (B. 1989) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include I Am An American Citizen, I Know My Rights, atNeochrome, Turin, Italy; and My Hamster Cage at, Bodega, NY. He is a co-director of Queer Thoughts (with Luis Miguel Bendaña), a contemporary art gallery in NYC.

[1]Holy basil is a plant. It is originally from India and is used in Ayurvedic medicine as an “adaptogen” to counter life’s stresses. It is considered a sacred plant by the Hindus and is often planted around Hindu shrines. The Hindu name for holy basil, Tulsi, means "The Incomparable One." Medicine is made from the leaves, stems, and seeds.

Central Fine presents a group show where free-association, visibility and loss face links and margins.

Lucila Garcia de Onrubia’s work is fluidly planted between hysteria and obsession while addressing the arbitrariness of those terms. The works presented in GAIN fold back and forth into design, into jewelry, into stages, and it seems that Garcia de Onrubia stands pro-et-contra the violence performed by genres and their divisive nature.

Instead of proposing arrivals, Garcia de Onrubia researches a type of liquidity and passive-aggressiveness, allowing for a look into the tensions between the material and the invisible. In her works, the gap between categories is an activator of the liminal, and that activator focuses on itself, or on the tension that is inherent in the notion of definition. It is in the zooming-into-things where her works bypass the censorship of form and material, confronting themselves through a set of semantic suspensions.  

Like Garcia de Onrubia’s work, Viktor El-Saieh seems to be part of a generation of artists that appeals to free-association and what we can call ‘the surrealist method’ as a strategy that allows for various interests to materialize through sampling. This retake on pictorial tactics that appeared in the 90’s (i.e. Michel Majerus, Markus Oehlen, Albert Oehlen) shares the DJing approach of its predecessors, but, rather than bringing together disparate elements, El-Saieh offers a narrative that emerges from what we can call the symbolic coating of the political and the perception of “The National”. This symbolic patina, or Haitian-ness acts like a unifying force that erases time, places and actors and emphasizes links rather than punctuations. In that sense, Viktor El-Saieh’s works share a formal equivalence with musical scores, where negative space can be understood as ‘silence’ and the defining factor in any composition. Although politically aware, his paintings are determined by gaps and holes between form and content, and it is in these absences where their agency exists beyond the narrative and its ideologies.

Richard Spit’s work appeals to a similar psychoanalytic approach. Through this associative methodology he addresses urgent issues such as the current state of the medical system, power structures, lack of infrastructure and the instrumentalization of identity politics.  By presenting the ready-made, again coated by the symbolic as material, Spit charges his paintings and sculptures with decentralization and abstraction. What we gain/lose is contained in a generic and yet, uncanny ‘shape’. This Das Ding[1] (The Thing, the repressed) finally surfaces and what appears isn’t revealed, but rather remains as an opaque sign that threatens to unfold into its own ambivalence.

[1] Das Ding: Freud introduces the term as “The Thing’ which exists in the id and presents itself as the unimaginable, that which exists beyond Language, see: Freud, Sigmund. "The Unconscious", 19l5e. SE XIV, 161. Lacan, on the other side, argues that the nature of the subconscious is linguistic, and separates Das Ding drom Die Sache, as Das Ding remains the real in itself, the unknowable; and Die Sache is the representation of ‘The Thing’ in the symbolic order, see:  Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p. 62-3, 44-5

I went to the market: the usual, tea and lentils, and why am I texting anything, I mean this opacity, and sometimes the monologue emerges like a joke in Coptic and I’m not an expert. I also thought that maybe you could restore that phantasmatic veil, the one that at some point was lost. Strange, I lost the phantom and I gained a ghost. I’m heading to analysis now and I’ll try and bring something from the Kosher market on 41st, and we will continue devouring the sunglasses you lost, the brick wall that merged with the floor without falling, flattening a translucent green man as a lettuce sandwiched between tiles and bricks. Access, access, a letter that begs for access. A letter is a far cry, in a way. And maybe a crucial triangle between the Threatened Word1, the Etymology of Passions2 and The Happy Apocalypses3. Somehow, the battlefield is anonymous, there’s no face, no image reigning. A battlefield as a gesture and a container at once, not being one or the other, that is, Kyle, what I think is happening here. If the pages of the gallery continue to turn into windows, then each move and countermove must avoid what is merely reactive, so, each gesture that is planned increases a displacement in the game. And we may not see the Store Experience Manager, but we can see the hysteric shop that houses your painted films through the glass bouncing us. What has been flattened trough the window is a sum of letters that you’ve collected and their exhaustion is exactly what you are protecting. Perhaps the exhaustion is a fruit, the fruit of a thousand codes that present the text with the possibility of its very own anxiety?

Diego Singh, Normandy Isles, 2015.

Kyle Chapman was born in South Africa. He has studied Interdisciplinary Practice and Fiber Manipulation at the Kansas City Art Institute and at New World School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited at “A Certain Sensitivity” at Space Mountain, 2014; Mythmaker at Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City, 2010 and Liminal Obitus at Scope Miami 2006. His first solo show will be held at Central Fine, Miami Beach.

Notes:

1.-Bordelois Ivonne: La Palabra Amenazada: Libros del Zorzal, Buenos Aires, 2003.
2.-Bordelois Ivonne: La Etimologia de las Pasiones, Libros del Zorzal, Buenos Aires, 2007.
3.-Bordelois Ivonne: El Alegre Apocalipsis, Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires,1995.

CENTRAL FINE presents Ant’s Tits, Tomm El-Saieh’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition title refers to a Haitian proverb that indicates that with patience, one can see an ant’s tits.

 Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port Au Prince in 1984. As a child he studied painting and trained with local painters in the area, understanding rhythm, color, and pattern as structural forces that have the potential to charge a surface beyond the visual. He observed narratives that ranged, in the works of his teachers, from the religious and the politic to the touristic. Growing up in Haiti as the son of a Haitian-Palestine father and an Israeli mother, Tomm faced a sense of removal from his societal experience in Port Au Prince, a removal that enhanced the perception that one could be part of a pertenence group while not fully participating in it. As El-Saieh points out: “I cannot talk for Haitians, or Isarelis or Palestinians, I need to address those backgrounds from a place of neutrality, from a place of abstraction. I need to look at those conflicting grounds and understand them as political and pictorial backgrounds in tension.” Eventually, this looking at the look of things became a defining aspect in Tomm’s body of work: When addressing the look of traditional Haitian painting (Identifiable by dots and marks, color, rhythm and over-determination in paint application) and eliminating any trace of narrative content, Tomm concentrates on the possibilities of that very state of removal/abstraction that is lived as intrinsic.

In the Ant’s Tits paintings, what is clear is that traditional Haitian flat color application has been replaced by a superimposition of transparencies, and that narratives are cancelled by a stream of marks or punctuations that overlap and present all-over surfaces, all-over points of view in a dry and specific way, retaining a highly meditative vibe, as if Painting was in a trance.

 Those transparencies, might also be read as a set of integrated and yet independent ways of addressing states of conflict, race, Voodoo, or, say, Nations and their idiosyncrasies, tensions, colors, etc.; all acting as interdependent filters that take into account their self-reflective capacity.  

Abstraction, as it its understood by Modernism is largely missing in the history of Haitian painting and this gap moved El-Saieh to develop a critical approach to the term and its manifestation in his works, an approach that somehow updates Haitian’s painting tradition and look, while investigating attention as a major focus or drive, a concept that is researched by many of his contemporaries. We can say that, right now, this vantage point is evident in the zooming into things, or is compulsively embodied in the attempt to observe and try to catch the Ant’s Tits. Moreover, today, the notion of attention seems to constantly redefine itself as a generational symptom driven by an extreme focus and a scattered or all-encompassing scope. The emphasis on observation, at once diagnosed with ADHD and all-over-the place, signals perhaps attention as a currency, and this currency is one that insists on placing itself as a link within the links that we upload and inhabit.

One can also say that an ADHD wandering eye and its chemical-induced focus, retains a level of ambivalence towards the notions of time, speed and space, and re-engages them via the liberation from the burden of progress. In that sense, Modernist aspirations for progress and the ineffable, are now scattered, fast/slow and Adderall-fueled modes of image production-consumption with an emphasis on the generic or the decentralized. What emerges then, is a type of abstraction, one that retains a degree of specificity and fluidity that allows for transparencies to affect each other, slow down, or speed each other up. And is that insistence one of the elements that Tomm El-Saieh brings forward in his meticulous paintings.

It seems to me that, Tomm’s interest in fabric design and patterns, t-shirts, Pointillism, all-over abstraction, Haitian-ness, or his grandfather’s voodoo-jazz orchestra all converge to present a politically charged merging of sorts, while considering attention as a currency, firmly floating over the ant’s armor, scanning it and detecting its tits.     

 Diego Singh, Port au Prince, 2015.

 Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port au Prince in 1984, studied at the New World school of the arts in Miami and currently directs the El-Saieh gallery in Haiti. Recently he has curated‘The Look’ at Gucci Vuitton in Miami, Guyodo, Above the ground, at the El-Saieh Gallery in Port au Prince; Relax Baby, or The Other Hand at the El-Saieh Gallery, Port au Prince; among others; and has held a solo exhibition at the Haitian Heritage Center, Miami in 2008.  Ant’s Tits is his first solo painting exhibition. His paintings will be included in an upcoming group exhibition presented at the ICA Miami, and at Lights-On Lights-Off an upcoming group exhibition at Central Fine Buenos Aires.

CENTRAL FINE presents The Right to be Forgotten, Hubert Bush’s first solo exhibition.

November 23, 2014 - February 29, 2015

What to do when the tides of discourse and taste rise against you? What to do with a first painting solo exhibition, with a painting show that wants to be remembered and dreads to vanish? Since our archives are getting heavier and sharper, and memories are producing clearer anxieties; we are in the knot between fear and impotence, and right there, at that point, we encounter that fine term: “Paradigm Shift”1. Everyone and everything seems to want a clean slate, a new brand, in the wake of a marketing-driven tectonic shake.  Well, let’s imagine that Painting requested to be deleted from all search engines, to start fresh.

For instance, in this exhibition, spray painting seems to be forgetting its past, and not only we can see this in its look but also in its subject matter: No more signs ready for the outdoors, but rather, spray-painted domestic and silent images. As if the spray-gun and that speedy gesture, the one that appeared in Martin Barre’s works, or the vertical signatures often banned by other guns, has now become dense and slow. And that lovely duo conformed by Speech or la parole3 and Lalangue4 are defacing discourse while facing themselves; giving to speech and its capacity for oblivion, a face.

What if our symptomatic fatigue switched speeds and slowed down even further, and we were to use spray paint to produce images that had nothing to do with the well-known material’s behavior? What if painting could ask for The Right to be Forgotten5 and start anew?

Wouldn’t it be great to bypass the tyranny of discourse, of forms, of mediums, and finally, through speech, approach a space of intensity, as the Lacanian Sphinx challenged us?

In Hubert Bush’s spray paintings we see what he calls afterimages, vibrating in the eye, once closed, resisting oblivion and ultimately coming back in the form of a déjà vu. And like ‘revenge porn’ (That poison-pen where someone would upload pornographic content into the web in order to defame you) this déjà vu, the déjà vu of painting, of texts, comes back to coat the painter with another layer of repression.

And yet, it might be that this exhibition is for Hubert Bush a first attempt to claim The Right to be Forgotten. If we go on-and-on mentioning the luminosity of Rothko, the tension between abstraction and figuration, or between pathos and boredom in these paintings, we will inevitably fall back into the place of mnemonic distress.

The Right to be Forgotten is the right to erase, and reclaim autonomy, to deface The Archive and face Discourse6 head-on. Ultimately, in my view, memory, painting, the past, a mark, whatever, are all entitled to re-define powder/power and its speed as vehicles or grounds. And, let’s not look at this as censorship, let’s look at this approach as another lively exchange between Speech7 and Discourse.

Hubert Bush was born in New York City. He worked as a filmmaker and script- writer. His paintings have been exhibited at Gallery Met in NYC and are part of the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum. He will hold an upcoming exhibition at the Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach during March, 2015.

Diego Singh, Miami, November 10, 2014

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Notes
1. Paradigm Shift: a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.

2. The French term parole presents considerable difficulty to the English translator because it does not correspond to any English term. In some contexts it corresponds to the English term "speech," and in others is best translated as word. Parole for Miller, is drive.

3. Lalangue could be understood as the primary chaotic substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed, almost as if language is some ordered superstructure sitting on top of this substrate.

4. The Right to be Forgotten is a concept that has been discussed and put into practice in the European Union and Argentina in recent years. The issue has arisen from the desires of some individuals to determine the development of his life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past.

5. Lacanian Discourse theory has to be understood primarily as a formal system, i.e. independent of any spoken word as such. A Discourse exists before any concretely spoken word; even more: A Discourse will determine the concrete speech act. This effect of determination is the reflection of the Lacanian basic assumption, that each discourse delineates fundamental relationships, resulting in a particular social bond.

6. Speech, is considered here in the Lacanian sense, as a symbolic exchange that links humans, and ultimately becomes the only means of access to the truth about desire "Speech alone is the key to that truth”. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits,Trans. Alan Sheridan London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 172

www.centralfine.com, diego@centralfine.com. 1226 Normandy Dr. Miami Beach, Fl, 33141. +1917-326-1218

CENTRAL FINE presents: The Sinking Parenthesis

Dec 5th, 2014 - January 30, 2015

Opening Reception December 5, 7 PM-Midnight

The issue of the origin, or origins, cats, superstition, water and silence were present in my last dream. I saw cats asking a male cat to breastfeed them. As if the dad-cat was a mother-cat but the cat had no milk. The kittens were adult cats, feeding from their motherly dad. The cat might be Martin Barre, or a reflection on man-boobs?

Next, Esther and I attempted to cross a small wooden bridge, but then both started jumping on it, bringing it down. We succeeded and fell into a beautiful green lake and swam our way out. Great experience. I think we wanted to sink the bridge, and just swim, but only swim surrounded by broken wood, because the day was stunning. We heard the name of Aimee Bonpland, the French botanist. (Good Plant, if we were to translate it). What’s interesting is that in fact, Bonpland’s last name was a nickname given to him by his grandfather after getting word of his birth in the countryside in France. The nickname became a family name, a captcha and his sign. His origin was retold at the moment of birth. The superstition of words/origins was left unresolved and I woke up. Now, I’m thinking about the sinking of the bridge, and how that action isolated me.

Somehow we wrecked the parenthesis, swimming our way above the surface of abstraction and enjoying the weather. This was really taxing on us, I must say, because in a moment we had to deal with a botanist, sinking a bridge, swimming nicknames, last-names, plants, plans, water and signs. The gesture was a passive aggressive one, but I think we had no choice as the cats aligned to stop us, on the other side of the bridge, fully developed of course, thanks to the milk of their single-dad.

Diego Singh

CENTRAL FINE BUENOS AIRES

Ugarteche 3050, Buenos Aires, El Palacio de los Patos. 1425. 

19 DE ABRIL-Mayo 21

VERNISSAGE: VIERNES 19 de Abril, de 19 a 21 horas. 

ARTISTS: Yin Quan und Brahma, Singh Diego, Hwang Jiae.

Press Release: 
Central Fine Buenos Aires presents an appointment between the duo Yin Quan & Brahma, Diego Singh and Jiae Hwang. The artists introduce Kazuo Funaki to Buenos Aires from many angles, making sure that his black and white photograph stumbles upon a space of potency. Using many hands, many heads, etc., the group exhibition clearly attempts to declare that the other only exits oneself when oneself admits that inside, there is no room for anything else.   
 Un hielito aca, regio, bueno...chausito. 

About the artists: 
Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul, Korea, and has exhibited her work in several venues, including: the Serpentine Gallery, London; The Miami Art Museum, Miami, Central Fine, Miami; The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo;  CCS Bard/ Hessel Museum, The Rubell Family Collection Miami; etc. She is the graphic design director of Central Fine Miami Beach. 

Diego Singh was born in Salta, Argentina. Has exhibited his work in several venues including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California, the Fondazzione Malvina Menegaz per le Arti e la Cultura, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami. He was co-founder of Terri and Donna Gallery in Miami. Currently directsand co-directs Central Fine Miami Beach, Buenos Aires (with Esteban Singh Caro and Gracia Martinez Arias) and Port au Prince (with Tomm El-Saieh.) 

Yin Quan und Brahma are obviously a made up duo selected because they share a lot: They are deities, and as such, they can float.  Brahma sports 4 heads, checking all angles of creation. Quan Yin, exhibits 1000 arms, and happens to inspire compassion. 
  

NOVEMBER 24, 2013-JANUARY 20, 2014  

OPENING RECEPTION SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24, 2013. FROM 2 - 10PM

Central Fine Miami Beach presents Rise Above:. A solo project by Jiae Hwang.

In Rise Above: Hwang explores the demand implicit in the phrase, and the expectations to perform accordingly. By ‘rising above’ one is expected to confront another well-known demand: Sink or Swim.
Hwang, (referred to as 'the artist')  proceeds to approach that demand as a sort of linguistic and cultural ready-made, and purposefully interprets it in another way: Rise becomes Rice. In that space, a phonetic interpretation that misreads the initial demand goes in full-force into what the artist calls ‘another type of translation’ bringing the artist’s subjectivity in contrast with the sentence's imperiousness.

In her works, Hwang proceeds to throw, and later trace, remove and paint Rice on top of large colored silk pieces. This gesture, to throw rice, is an auspicious act in the West, but in Korea, where Hwang was born, throwing rice is a disrespectful gesture towards economy, labor and tradition. To throw it on top of silk would be an even greater offense, as it would imply a negative handling of highly charged economic/symbolic elements. Hwang doesn’t go for that, but rather pursues the space where misinterpretation brings forward new meaning. Shortly: Fashion, Dry-cleaning, Silk painting, trade, are all faced as cultural pockets.

In the exhibition, Hwang presents a YouTube-found looped video of penguins jumping onto an iceberg. The penguins are expected to rise above it, but instead they slide, fall, or swim back into the ocean, behaving like fish, unable to fly like other birds.

In Jiae Hwang’s project concepts such as reading, performance, language, expectations, all are translated and interpreted through a view that emphasizes equality. For her,  To Rice is the same as To Rise, the trompe l’oeil of rice is placed on equal terms on top of the Ready-Made ground, the Ready-Made ground meets Color Field abstraction, and Color Field Abstraction encounters a ‘Colored Field’ and non-gender specificity in the silk's peach blossom, or navy businessman's tones.

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Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her work was included in Aesthetics and Value, at the Frost Museum, Miami, FL; New Work Miami, Miami Art Museum,  FL; Optic Nerve, MOCA NOMI, Miami; El Museo de Arte de El Salvador; El Salvador; Abstract Cinema, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Video Revolutionaries, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Footnotes about Geopolitical, Markets and Amnesia, 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia. Uncertain States of America American Art in the 3rd Millenium: Traveled to The Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom, the Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik,Iceland, the CCA Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland, Le Musee de Serignan, Serignan, France, Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art,Oslo, Norway, Bard CCS, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.  Video: An Art, A History 1965-2005 New Media Collection from the Centre Pompidou, Miami Art Central, Miami;  At This Time: 10 Miami Artists, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL.

Georgia Sagri presents Diana Speaks with animals, a sequel to Diana Very DOG, (DVD), CENTRAL FINE'S INNAUGURAL PROJECT.  Diana speaks with animals, a performance project initiated in Athens, is to be installed and broadcasted in Miami Beach. The project consists of a series of photos showing Sagri running in Atehns at 5,45 AM, occupying streets, houses, as a nymph, or a Rimbaudian look-alike, on the loose. The works are framed as books, narrating chapters, scenes, and a video: DOG, shows Sagri working on her desktop, editing the sound, the visuals and the performance in real-time. Discourse is replaced by speech, or Lalangue, as Sagri intervenes the Lacanian concept thorugh a series of abstractions in sound, where her voice becomes pure rhythm, punctuations and beats, abstracting language and aiming for sound.

November 29th, 2012-March 20, 2013

Opening reception Thursday 29th, 2012. From 12-9 pm.

CENTRAL FINE presents its inaugural exhibition program with Diana Very Dog, a solo project by Georgia Sagri.

Diana belonging to the Roman Pantheon of deities poses a question here. One cannot help to wander why Sagri invokes her name rather than the Greek goddess Artemis.  May be that Diana, belonged to a model, such as the Roman one? And maybe Sagri, an Athenian, is purposefully advocating for a repulse of her national deities, by choosing a 'newer' and more 'arrow-minded' version of Artemis? Is Sagri observing the mandate of not using Artemis name in vain? Or is it that Sagri is interested in the meteoric trajectory of Diana's arrow and that her name starts with a D, such as Dog or Diogenes' School of Cynics?

Diana has the capacity to speak to animals and she is also an accomplished hunter, qualities that Sagri is after, as seen in her video piece where dogs bark, her wall text or her photos as a naked nymph with a Rimbaudian haircut; Sagri speaks a speech that seems delivered by a person with a triple Id: Action & Action & Action. Such a triple Id subject is, surprisingly, in total consciousness and control over the notion of own-her-ship. And let's be clear here, rather than being spoken, Sagri speaks to It, first and foremost to herself, and later to us with a present and yet ancient own-her-ship.
She navigates the streets/ while delivering a voice/ that tongue/ that form of speech outside the limitations of the History of Speech/ that shadow of mystery daily embodied and experienced by herself.
Sometimes one thinks that she is made or built by phrases that carry within themselves the problem of force. In that unstable ground, Sagri as a topos where one can load content hunts for titles, for sounds, for forms that direct her trajectory-the structure of action. On ACTION-PLACE-SPEECH we observe an interest in links and hyper abstraction while participating. A Chorus in the broadcasting of a destabilizing omnipresence: SAGRI HERE, SAGRI WHERE, VERY SAGRI, DIANA VERY DOG.

Georgia Sagri lives in Athens and New York. She has participated at the Whitney Biennial 2012 and has held exhibitions and performances in venues such as: MoMa, NY, PS1 MoMa, NY, The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Anthony Reynolds gallery, London, Real Fine Arts, NY, Andrew Roth gallery, NY, Terri and Donna Gallery, Miami; The Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami, Lars Friedrich gallery, Berlin, SOTOSO, Brussels, MelasPapadopoulos, Athens; among others. Georgia Sagri has been featured in conversations and articles in publications such as Art Forum Magazine, Art in America, Texte Zur Kunst and the New York Times.