Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea presents a new exhibition project featuring three major figures of the international contemporary art scene. Beyond Color is an emotional dialogue between selected works by Peter Halley, Prudencio Irazábal and Jason Martin, which fulcrum rotates around the research of a space ruled by color, light and material.
Despite the total lack of figuration, the leading creative force that links the three artists investigates the infinite potential of color (by using innovative painting techniques), which allows the viewer's mind to "sort" seemingly entropic scenarios, but actually dominated by their skillful gesture.
The one offered by Peter Halley is a "digital" scenery that traps the eye between jails and connections, forcing us to reflect upon the often alienating relationship between human kind and machines in today's society. His canvases, boasting fluo colours and textured effects, are like living things - asking us to be looked at as such.
Prudencio Irazábal, for the first time on display in Italy, paints "things that cannot be painted". His works are transparent and candid. However, despite offering rich surfaces full of radiating colours and deep space, thay also hide any trace of gesture, revealing the process followed and suggesting something "beyond" painting. The relationship between surface and depth plays a key role in his works, while color - mediated by the transit of light through thin paint layers - becomes a unique and kaleidoscopic perceptual experience.
Jason Martin channels a minimal approach to painting through an expansive yet controlled use of color, brush and medium. Structured according to the harmonic relationships between these hues (included in the titles), the paintings manifest as parallel strata, their horizons exploring suggestions of landscape and atmosphere through the viscosity of oil or the materic effect obtained through his signature technique.
The color is not, therefore, a creative or a disruptive entity, but rather acts as a shaper, and it simply suggests what the artists want us to see. An invitation to voyage that demands to leave behind any border line and inibition, where abstraction and imagination merge into an inner and profound conversation.
BIOGRAPHIES
Peter Halley (New York, USA, 1953) lives and works in New York, USA. A central figure of the Neo-Conceptualism movement in the 1980's, he is best known for using Day-Glo acrylic paint and Roll-a-Tex in his geometric paintings. Very recognized as an essayist, Halley has been also Director of the School of Fine Art and Printmaking at Yale University School of Art from 2002 to 2011. Halley's works are featured in some of the most important international collections, such as the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tate Modern in London.
Prudencio Irazábal (Puentelarrà, Spain, 1954), lives and works in Madrid. After studying Fine Arts in Seville and Barcelona, he completed his studies in Columbia University, New York, where he moved in 1986. After a period of research confronting the elements of painting in terms of irreducible facts, color and light became the main element of his work. His paintings have been acquired from the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, the Hermès Foundation of Paris and many other European private collections.
Jason Martin (Channel Islands, UK, 1970) lives and works between London and Lisbon. He has studied at Chelsea School of Art in London and at Goldsmith in London, where he completed his studies in 1993. His participation in the Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection exhibition, in 1997, has marked his entrance in the international artistic panorama. Since then, the artist has exhibited in important museums and institutions, such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in collaboration with Mimmo Scognamiglio gallery in 2009. He has won several prizes, such as the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art (1999) and the European Biennial of the Visual Arts in La Spezia, Italy (2000).
ARTISTS ON VIEW: Peter Halley | Prudencio Irazábal | Jason Martin
