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articles
Radioactive
spring: Sarah de Teliga revisits nature. Tania
Mouraud: Martin Luther King speeches, nails and brass rings, violins, accordions,
and computer generated sounds: an ode to music. Emily
Harvey: a life in
fluxus. Swept
off my feet: Keith Donovan in poetic frame on Jerome
Borel's Paris inspired paintings. America
it seems, is holding vast quantities of Codeine,
Tiger Balm, Tylenol, Preparation H, Chanel No. 5, and Vaseline. Fear
and painting in America: flagging multiculturalism. Jeremy
Stigter's Japanese landscapes: an empire of emptiness. Strange
money: Peggy Preheim
makes a buck. The
lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably ours: Caterina
Verde in Eindhoven. "This
coming together between video, photography and paint involves the environment
and myself. The video footage acts like a paintbrush" says Valentina
Loi. [Warhol
Factory hand] Billy Name once said of Ray Johnson
that he "wasn't a person, he was a collage, a sculpture." Exacting
images of people in the celebrated and banal act
of wearing clothes. Could this be you? James Startt focuses on Uniforms. On
a sun-bleached rooftop a stone’s throw from the Villa Borghese
in Rome, romantic
minimalist Livia
Signorini unfurls
a “quilt” made of Horvath candy wrappers. Painting is either back, or, never left the building.
A discussion around the state of art today. Did
Picabia prefigure our current
human-technology
questions? MADE
IN JAPAN: KILLER CUTENESS INVADES PARIS "What
I do is not really art, not really furniture," chairs
from the throne to the unsitable. Michael
Mandiberg is selling everything. Everything is art, everything is for
sale "...Images
of the Towers being struck and then falling in a plume of smoke." One illusion
of Heaven against other illusions of Heaven.
Fought to the death?" A
letter from Paris, from Basel. Art 32 Basel
reviewed. Swiss
artist thomas hirschorn, in association with
the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Jean-Noel Laszlo: liberty
is still controversial.
Jonathan Horowitz's interactive low- technology web
enabled art show reviewed.
part
1 Art, Paris, porn and the web. part
2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film. part
3
asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction? |
letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
  
thick
emptiness and holes: caterina verde’s anatomy of melancholy
thick
emptiness and holes
might be the most original name for an exhibition of clouds and vacant classrooms.
It is a name, however, that fits. In nine C-prints and three ink jet prints on
view at Galerie Pennings, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, French-American artist
Caterina Verde (aka Kathryn Greene) captures emptiness while choreographing her
images in a kind of cross-pollination of absences. The works are an exhumation
of waiting and those anxious moments--the visual moments--affixed to that emotional
state. When viewing
Verde’s work-- a range of video, painting, photography and photomontage--
I am often reminded of my ability to "see" anything at all, for there
is in her artistic enterprise an affective inward and outward movement, an aesthetic
inhaling and exhaling, with overtones of the apocalypse. In her multi-media works,
Verde traps the poignancy of evanescence, of something about to happen, or what
it looks like after it has happened: the trace of an event, or the after-murmur
of the heart. 
Cloud
4 © Caterina Verde 2003
Using
simple forms and strong, graphic sensibilities, Verde manages to infuse easy-on-the-eye
images such as clouds, beds, and children’s playground slides & merry-go
rounds, with a confrontational emotionalism. Not by creating larger than life-sized
prints, but rather by dipping her beautifully composed images into a vat of universal
melancholy. Think of the angry echo of a loved one hanging in the air, long after
she or he has left the room. (You stand there staring at the blender, or the tile
floor, or the doorknob). I want to call this a "crisis" aesthetic, one
that treads on emotion and is beautiful no matter the carnage that transpired
seconds before, or even moments after. "A great deal of my work deals with
the fragility of perception," says Verde. "How and what we claim is
reality--and the emotional potency of space." Verde’s
cloud series fuses nature with nostalgia. In her poster image for the Eindhoven
show, a thick ceiling of clouds reveals, astonishingly, an eye. An image, said
Verde, taken directly from the sky without digital manipulation. She names the
photographs (which measure 60 cm x 90 cm; edition of 5), simply: Cloud 1, Cloud
2, Cloud 3 and Cloud 4. "Nature always shows us something if we’re paying
attention," she said of the images she photographed in France. "The
sky was so full the day I photographed the clouds. It felt apocalyptic, as if
the sky had become the ocean and was swelling downward. Someone told me don’t
let a priest get his hands on these pictures." 
Family
Portrait 2 © Caterina
Verde 2003
Her
family portraits--an alligator and an iguana (inkjet prints) framed in ovals--
lure one back into childhood and in their quiet kitsch, they too, silently scream
a contemporary anxiety. The effect is iconic and mysterious, as well. Verde’s
interior spaces--a vacated children’s classroom, a room filled with mattresses
on the floor--are impregnated with dread, which she calls "a kind of inhale."
I’m moved to think of the great architectural projects of humanity, and the
simple efforts directed towards children to inspire order, and yet to question
the massive folly of humanity. How indeed, we are captives of our form, our civilization,
of gravity. 
Beds
© Caterina Verde 2003
Instead
of bearing witness to an accident, Verde inverts the process of looking, and inserts
the viewer at the moment(s) of consequence. The crisis is that moment just before
(or after) innocence is slaughtered. This artist has a unique ability to share
her personal experience and open it up to others, instead of producing market
deadening objects for facile consumption. Her video, The Edge of the Yard (2003),
(not on view), elevates the commonplace and questions simply and directly our
claims on reality. Here, humanity is questioned, when a son berates his father
who is issuing political platitudes: "How do you know? How do you know?"
Verde cuts this interchange with images of sharks swimming in aquarium tanks,
fissures in snow banks, and children’s playgrounds--all absent of people--
letting us know again that these lonely contents of a strange world are undeniably
ours. Download
an A4 full colour pdf of the poster for Verde's show from our news
page. For
more information:
Galerie Pennings Geldropseweg 6 1 B NL 5611 SE Eindhoven,
The
Netherlands
Tel +3 1 (0)40 -2930270 E-mail: galpen@iae.nl Website:
www.galeriepennings.nl
Caterina Verde: molesauce@hotmail.com Matthew
Rose is a writer and artist based in Paris. E-mail: mistahrose@yahoo.com
affiliates
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