In Abbas Kiarostami's 2010 film Certified Copy, a writer and a stranger spend an afternoon in Tuscany moving between the roles of acquaintances, then lovers, then estranged spouses. The film never confirms whether they have a history or are inventing one as they go—whether what we are watching is the real thing or a very convincing facsimile. Objects, places, and gestures accumulate meaning as the afternoon unfolds, familiar forms taking on new weight with each passing hour.
Taking the film's title for this show, Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by Tim Wilson, featuring works by Nicole Cherubini, André Hemer, Matvey Levenstein, Al Svoboda, and Tim Wilson.
While not illustrative of that premise, the five artists here share something of its logic: that familiar forms—a bench inviting company, a bouquet dissolved in light, paint opening onto sky, interiors caught in mirrors, fields of color divided and reassigned, accumulate meaning through repeated handling, and that the distance between an original and its translation is where the most interesting things happen.
The work in this show neither discards these inherited forms nor simply preserves them, but rather puts them back to work. Some of that work is structural. Cherubini begins with a recognizable piece of furniture—its social logic, the implied distances between bodies, but quietly frustrates its practical function. Built as a double bench whose backs face one another, A Strawberry Mind, Bed of Flower, Tete-A-Tete borrows the form of the nineteenth-century courting chair, designed to bring together while keeping apart, its title drawn equally from the name of that form and from the lyrics of Sheila E. Gouffres Amers, tall and draped in gold chain, takes its title from a Surrealist painting by Ithel Colquhoun. That range is characteristic of how she works: sources pulled from everywhere, materials pushed past their original purposes. Svoboda's LOT paintings operate with similar structural awareness, using strips of color to divide larger fields into allocated zones. The title carries its own weight: a lot as a parcel of allocated space, a lot as a collection of personal effects, a lot as something assigned rather than chosen. Built from recurring motifs and self-imposed constraints, the paintings treat composition as something constructed rather than depicted. But that structure is never left alone—complications press against it, each one an opportunity to repair back toward order or let the deviation stand. Their systems remain visible but never entirely predictable. Repetition generates variation, organization produces discovery, and structure becomes a condition for improvisation. Both artists borrow the logic of systems—seating arrangements, storage, measurement, that introduce unresolved outcomes where efficiency was expected.
Hemer and Wilson both begin with mediated images, but what they do with them diverges. Hemer moves paint through a series of physical and digital transformations—sculpted, photographed, printed, and repainted, so that each stage leaves its trace embedded in the final surface. His Troposphere paintings hold the memory of states passed through, the tondo format opening onto spaces that feel simultaneously expansive and compressed, as much weather as image. The oval canvases deliberately echo the ceiling frescoes and shaped canvases of the Renaissance—virtual windows that collapse multiple geographies into a single surface. No single sky, but a composite of skies, each a copy of several originals at once. The title points to the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where conditions are constantly in flux—and the paintings behave accordingly, never fully settling into either abstraction or representation. Wilson starts further back, with film stills, photographs, and observed interiors—scanning the outer edges of the image rather than its center, catching what narrative leaves behind. Mirrors, lamps, stairwells, flowers, and framed photographs are pulled from their original contexts and slowed down until temperature, structure, and association emerge. These are not particular places but latent spaces, idealized interiors, leading somewhere without ever arriving. For Wilson, the material facts of painting: color, its liquid form, and the substrates that hold them are the truth of the work. Everything else is fiction. Where Hemer's surfaces accumulate process, Wilson's accumulate attention.
Levenstein's paintings stay close to their subjects—flowers gathered in a vase, a stand of trees after rain, amber light filling a layered interior, but their real interest is in what sustained looking does to the familiar. Rendered through restrained shifts of color and value, the images hover between clarity and dissolution, as though emerging from memory or time rather than direct observation. Working slowly in oil, building up paint and scraping it back, Levenstein produces surfaces that feel deliberate and considered, carrying the record of prolonged attention. The subjects remain fully recognizable; what shifts is the experience of looking at them. Where the other artists in the exhibition press on inherited forms from the outside, through systems, mediation, and reconstruction, Levenstein works from within, and the subjects do not so much transform as deepen under the weight of looking.
What connects these five artists is not a shared style but a shared willingness to handle familiar things carefully and see what they give back. The work stays open—finished in form, alive in implication. Like Kiarostami's film, uncertainty lingers—about origins, translation, and why that should matter.
