“Once there were parking lots, now it’s a peaceful oasis / This was a Pizza Hut, now it’s all covered with daisies / I miss the honky-tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-Elevens / And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.”
- "Naked" Talking Heads
Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to announce (Nothing But) Flowers, a group show of new work by: Michiel Ceulers, Jo Nigoghossian, Anthony Pearson, Paul Pascal Theriault and Lisa Williamson. (Nothing But) Flowers, portrays the unfamiliar and surprising evidence of a residual and discomposed world. A testimony to the degradation of certainty and to the emergence of a hopeful era.
Anthony Pearson’s five new sculptural etched plaster reliefs, present a constantly evolving vocabulary of autonomous, expressive gestures within a rigorous formatting. A direct evolution from his first body of work (Photographic Accidents), the chalky and matte surfaces are a reflection on the experience of material investigation and the function of light. Each etched line is a sculptural gesture that prompts the object to respond to its context: hanging on the wall at eye level, the sculptures register equally a dual status of object and image.
Michiel Ceulers paintings investigate paint, color and light. At first, these inconvenient and uncompromising paintings are hard to grasp, but on a second and third look these small, rather dirty paintings are precise and sharply handled. His collages deal with the idea of narrative, physicality and content. The rough surfaces highlight the decay and the scars that came from wandering the artist studio. Ceulers describes these works as an attempt to retrace his activities, the residue of the echo generated by his movement. Dirty marks, thumbprints, ripped and badly stretched canvases are an integral part of his work. He is not interested in beautiful or representational pictures. Once the paintings have left the confines of his home/studio they cease to be in a constant state of flux and they finally become.
Nigoghossian’s sculptures are lurking bits of darkness that still sleep in the shadows. Her welded sculptures made of steel with rubber and neon inserts are usually self-supporting and sit directly on the floor. In doing so, they remove a barrier between the work and the viewer, invited to approach and interact with them from all sides. These cobbled together forms are pushed to the limit of their materiality and ultimately appear broken down; they possess the emphatic physicality and internal complexity rejected by many artists since the heyday of Minimalism in the 1960s.
At first glance, Paul Pascal Theriault’s mixed media paintings and installations rouse a visual cacophony and spirit of psychedelic meandering. They reflect the artist’s technique he calls “Tom Sawyer”, indicative of the symbolism of painting of the white fence in the famed allegory. Conjuring the notion that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. In order to make a man covet a thing it is only necessary to make it difficult to obtain.
L.A. based artist Lisa Williamson makes work that follows an internal logic as honestly as possible. For this exhibition, she has created 3 idiosyncratic carved wood wall sculptures. These works combine simple line drawings and narratives, blending a minimalist aesthetic with a whimsical surrealist energy. The objects act as stand-ins for the artist or for another person; they may feel like figures even if there are very few figurative qualities. The artworks act as thinking-objects, forms hanging in a space, coexisting with architecture… personalities pressed into a chosen material.