Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Rannva Kunoy’s first solo exhibition in New York. Kunoy’s new works deliberately hijack our expectations for the process of looking. The paintings demand attention. As one moves across the painting, the surface, the color and the tone of the work changes. A surface that appears to be a saturated purple shifts to an iridescent green. A group of pastel paintings made up of hues of glowing candy-like colors, which are also translucent and murky, reflect the surrounding light, shifting their appearance and enhancing their experiential nature. The flickering changes in color, though, is not an effect—it is meant to arrest the viewer’s gaze.
While the dual change of color across the surface of the paintings is being negotiated, the viewer is once again drawn in by the flurry of scored and smudged marks that make up the image created by transference in reversals. As one travels over the broad surfaces of the canvas, lines and contours with a strong photographic aura appear that bring vividly to mind shapes and objects from the real world. These are an invitation to take a look at the experience and psychology of perception. The marks themselves are difficult to categorize as both the surface and the image continuously fluctuate. There is no texture and no actual gesture. They appear to incorporate the haunted and unstable, yet deliberate and intangible. This results in an unfulfilled desire to understand how the painting was physically made, while, at the the same time recognizing embedded images that coalesce like bubbles on water before bursting again.
The works carry titles that can be described to be of an iconoclastic nature, questioning settled beliefs and institutions. In the exhibition, Kunoy presents a sophisticated painting codex— one that understands how painting can claim the viewer, perplexing and intoxicating in equal measure.
