Jon Pestoni

at David Kordansky Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

GPY, 2012

This is the spring break. Yellow sun, green trees and white lazy vacation days. The spring break also is about drinking and hooking up. Yellow is a color of Inferiority complex. You are feeling insecure and jealous. Jealous of someone that you think is luckier or more experienced than you. Add to this your own lack of experience. You jump straight in the middle of white uncharted waters. So the dating part is pretty much a disaster. You emerge on the other side jealous as before, only more bruised and scarred. And because of your excessive drinking some parts of the vacation are blankly white.

Sean Scully

at Timothy Taylor Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Doric, 2011

There are black days. Those are the days when you just survive. When later you try to remember those days, you cannot because nothing happened. There are better days(gray). They are filled with hopes, dreams. On those days you do things to improve your life. And there are bright days. Those days you remember all your life. On those days you feel that you accomplished something, you have improved your life or lives of others. On those days you were happy. The bright days are the pillars of your life. There are not a lot of bright, happy days, but if you have any, your life can withstand any disaster

Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe

at Alexander Gray Associates (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Dawn in any city, 2011

People make up the face of a city. They can brighten a gray, gloomy and depressing city. They can ruin a perfect town. People add colors to the buildings and streets. But as the number of people swells, you start feeling overwhelmed by the mobs. You feel like a sand grain in the sea - isolated and insignificant. You feel very lonely and crowded at the same time. That's why you are trying to escape : behind a newspaper, into the headphones or onto the internet.

When I finished writing about this work, I have realized that I already have a post about it. So for those who are interested here the link to the same artwork.

Weekend edition 29

Frantisek Kupka

Etude pour la montée, 1920

To grow something you need some soil (black figures in the bottom) and some water (whitish blue figures stretching from the bottom to the middle). All of the sudden your plant is growing. You need to feed it small portions of sun and water (red figures with blue border) That is how you make your idea-dream into the reality. the soil is your creativity. The water is your resources. and the sun is the exposure to the bigger environment. If the idea is good enough, it will get only stronger with the critique and the competition.

Allison Katz

at Johan Berggren Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Add caption

As we know people love to watch. They love to watch not only what is happening now, but what has happened before. They love history. People have tendency to forget bad things, so naturally the historical events look much better than they really were. As the time runs the details of the events are lost. That puts a layer of mystery on the history. Mysteries attract people. Combine all of the above together and you get Nostalgia.

Dan Rees

at T293 (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Artex Painting, 2012

People like to watch.They watch all time starting from a fire in a cave and continue through gladiators' fights to the TV. It is our basic instinct to watch out for danger.We are hard wired to watch. When there is no danger (other than to gain weight), most of the people relax and duly watch whatever they see on the screen.But there are some people who go beyond the layer what they are shown. They watch the flames of feelings, the fights of morality and the dramedy of psychology.

Katharina Grosse

at Johann König (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Untitled, 2010

Women need to create an aura of mystery around them. The woman is always conscientious about her look. She is always in control of her outer image. She takes the created mystery(black), wraps it tight with her mind and will (violet). Then she invents her style(yellow) to beautify the parcel. And on top of all that she puts a layer of naivety, carelessness and lightness(the blueish green).

Ivan Morley

at Kimmerich (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

A True Tale, 2011

Life is unexpected and surprising. Real things and real events could be stitched together so randomly in real life, so it creates a surreal scenario. It creates a plot that impossible to think of. If someone would put it in a movie or a book, I would say that his imagination's got too wild. The plot seems like a tale, but all the events are true. Sot it is a true tale. 

Patricia Silva

Untitled

You are cold. Your soul is frozen. Then you meet someone. He is new, funny and unpredictable. He is easy to talk to. You are spending more and more time together. His novelty and growing passion make a dent inside your icebergs. Suddenly the ice turns into a blue blue skies.

Weekend Editon 28

Wassily Kandinsky

Black and Violet, 1923

He and She. She is on the left, all curvy and round. She is full of sun rays, sunsets and horizons. She is romantic, but she is very detail-oriented. He is solid, logical. He is more about strategy and general directions. He lets her to fill out the details, while she is following his directions. They are different, but are atreacted to each other like magnets.

Mark Francis

at Kerlin Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Hadron, 2012

The black circles are the musical notes, sounds. Together they create a delicate network of melody(black lines). The subtle net of music grabs you, extracts feelings from you. It compresses the feelings(blue, white bands) into a wall of spirit. The wall is the foundation of your mood and your behavior. The delicate sounds of music create magic.

Latifa Echakhch

at kaufmann repetto (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Sans Titre (XXIV), 2012

You are slowly getting conscience. Everything is black, empty and void. You are starting to see the glimpses of light. You get the small pieces of puzzle. You have been abducted. You are very frightened. Buy your captors are treating you well. You are building some kind of relationship with them. They don't seem so evil as at first. This is your brain trying to span a net of rationalization on the black gap of reality. This is Stockholm Syndrome.

Mary Heilmann

at Hauser & Wirth ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Mojave Mirage,2012

You have two parts : the logic(the left part of the diptych) and the feelings(the right side of the diptych). The logic is simple, organized and easily manipulated into a square. The feelings on the other hand, are unruly, unpredictable and impossible to manage. The more you dive into the dangerous sea of feelings, the more it expands.It even can lead to the uncharted territory(the white space outside the canvases).

Armin Boehm

 at Harris Lieberman (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Aliya, 2012

Aliya is the Jewish immigration to Israel. It comes from the verb lealot - to raise. You need to move when you feel that you don't belong to your current place. You have to raise above the deep roots that you have, because you are drying out(the trees). You have to overcome the burdens of  the journey (the desert behind the trees). Your previous experience and background will help you to establish in the new place (the small town near the mountains). The life there would not be easy, those are pretty dangerous mountains surrounding this small place.But when a man has an ideal, a dream, he can move everything, even mountains.

Michael Bauch

at Galerie Karin Guenther ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Untitled, 2012

You create and maintain your social environment (unless of course you are forced to a specific social environment when you are found guilty breaking a law). But as much you influence your surrounding, the environment influences you. Some of your strands are pushed wide away from each other, some are hammered together.You are a bunch of your character strands (the vertical lines) bound by pieces of your social network (the rectangles) you have picked up on your life journey.

Weekend Edition 27

Richard Diebenkorn

Untitled, 1970

Winter. Naked black trees. Everything is gray. Even the snow is not white anymore. You have a cold, depressing feeling. Everything is smaller than it is used to be. The roads are narrower. You have a need to cuddle into small with your blanket. You are passive, trying to save the energy to heat yourself.

Sophie Von Hellerman

at Greene Naftali ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

September 01 (explosion)

Autumn is very beautiful. It is very colorful : orange, yellow, green, brown. It is bright, cheerful, sexy. And depressing. It is sad, because you know all this beauty is a preamble to emptiness, cold, gray skies, rains and winter. This is the cycle of nature  : everything dies to give room to new things. The autumn is a good reminder that the time is going by as a river with a strong stream. And we will have our September sooner or later.

Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe

at Alexander Gray Associates ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Dawn in any city , 2011

The man can put everything into boxes. He can organize, catalog and categorize everything. That's how we deal with the Unknown. But you cannot put Nature into a box. It will fight you. The Nature will be free or it will die. So for the Nature it is a survival fight. And sometimes when the Nature cannot escape, it will create a small world inside its box. Inside her small world the Nature is free.

Dan Bayles

at François Ghebaly Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Interior #2, 2009

Voyeurism. Everyone likes to peep. You know it is wrong. You know it is not appropriate, but still you slightly separate those slides to peek. Our fondness of mysteries and  our craving for new things win over the moral. We always are looking for something new, something unknown, a mystery. But there is not much to look at. The entire mystery is the neighbor mowing his lawn.

JD Williams

at Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Untilted, 2010

Two siblings. They clash constantly. They ridicule, taunt, and fight each other.The elder is fighting for his already established authority and position. The younger is trying to carve a niche for himself. The elder is more weathered and more easily compromises and is ready to get outside help. The younger needs to prove himself, so he knows no compromises and doesn't want any help. Though as a youngest he is a favorite and more spoiled. The biggest prize they are fighting about is the attention of their parents.

Pablo Picasso

at Gagosian Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

La femme-fleur (Françoise Gilot), 1946

This is a an attractive, beautiful and elegant woman. She is full aware of her beauty. And she uses her attractiveness to the full extent. You can think that this is her only weapon. But she has a "killing" combination of beauty and a sharp mind. But it's not a weapon, it's a tool. She uses her talents as a flower that attracts bees. It has nothing to do with bees, the flower has its own agenda. The woman uses them to attract others and to observe them. She is an artist, because the real artist is an observer. Her observations nurtures her attractiveness and  deepens her mind.

Read about the exhibition at Gagosian Gallery

Weekend Edition 26

Jasper Johns

Ventriloquist, 1986

Midwest. Two brothers are working on the farm. They served in the army, in Vietnam. They did because they thought it was the right thing to do. now, it is not cool to talk about it, so they keep quiet about the service. They look like simple people, but they are much more sophisticated. They remind a whale, big powerful, but mostly hidden under the water. Because they are silent, somebody else uses it and put the words in their mouthes.

Juan Uslé

at Frith Street Gallery (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Zebulon Metro, 2009

 It is very important to have a good foundation. When your base is solid, robust, and well-designed for the task you can build anything.  When your foundation, your spine(black-gray rectangles) is full of steel and black energy, you can withstand any problem or burden that is laid on you. Nevertheless your spine should be flexible, because the heavy loads ask for a certain flexibility. The stiff spine breaks easier.The things that don't break your spine make you stronger(the color bands create a new spine in the center).

Tom Friedman

at Stephen Friedman Gallery ( Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

Untitled (The garden), 2010

Seemingly wilderness of a garden is a product of a careful design and hard work. All these efforts are trying to put the right plans in and to rid of the wrong ones. The weeds are not wrong, they just don't follow gardener's rules. The same  applies to people. It's your rules that divide people to the right ones and to the wrong ones.Your weed person is the perfect right person for someone else.

Sanya Kantarovsky

at Marc Foxx (Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

A New Talented Writer, 2012

This is a book. You can see that is a mystery fiction. It is read on one breath, it is so interesting. It is written by delicate and elegant language. The author is pretty new. He has fresh ideas as that breeze that enters the room through the window that we don't see on the left. The real talent is not only to create a book that appeals to the readers, the real talent conveys a big message, a world view as you wish, from the artist. The meta-message lays in inside layers of the creation. It works almost on sub-conscience level.  The real talent has layers on layers stacked up in his creation. The layers interact with each other.

Julije Knifer

at Galerie Frank Elbaz(Frieze Art Fair New York 2012)

AP 35, 2003

Are you a black kind of person that accumulates energy(the black rectangle in the lower left corner) then runs along a narrow strip(the adjacent narrow vertical black line). Then he jumps sideways to another narrow strip (in the center), so he can build up his energy level for the next jump(the black rectangle in the upper left corner). Or are you a white kind of person that methodically and slow overcome all the obstacles and moves from the lower left corner to the upper right corner. The thing is no matter what way you choose (white or black) you will get to the same point.