16 February-21 March 2013
“Quadrivium” features the collage work of Lola Dupré, Shusuke Ao, Jordan Clark, Gordon Magnin, Robert Larson, Val Britton, Irina & Silviu Szekely, and Justin Angelos.
The historic quadrivium comprised four core subjects, or arts, taught in the Renaissance Period. The word is Latin, translating roughly to a “place where four roads meet.” These cores consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, and were rooted in thinking skills for their theoretical applications. The quadrivium may be considered to be the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time: arithmetic was pure number, geometry was number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in space and time.
Lola Dupré in particular alludes to arithmetic, the pure number. Her razor-sharp collage slices are formed by multiplying an image, then dismantling it; adding to, subtracting from, and dividing the original image until it becomes an explosive suggestion of its former subject. Geometry is revered by all in this group, aided by all of the artists’ preference for paper as a medium. Clark’s, Magnin’s, and the Szekelys’ use of magazine paper especially highlight their like-minded veneration of number in space. Their cut shapes celebrate relation to one another in space, as in Magnin’s deconstructed faces measured by linear segments, prisms, and grids. They also create distances in space and from the viewer: both Clark and the Szekelys have a tendency to obscure the faces of the subjects in their artwork with geometric permutations of the entire image (Clark), or by other collaged objects and even, in some instances, decapitation (Szekely).
Music, the number in time, is implied in Larson’s choreographed collages of cigarette packaging and matchbooks. The artist collects the material for each artwork over long periods of time, and in varied states of each material’s aging process. The resulting assemblages are sequenced with reference to their nuances of use and wear, creating patterns formed essentially by time. Justin Angelos’ works also resound musically in his eclectic compositions of lively objects and people, strung together at high and low notes by a persistence of paper lines and circles. Britton’s and Ao’s work reference astronomy. Britton abstracts space and time, her map-like images navigating, making connections, and dissolving into un-defined masses of topographical shapes. Ao, in contrast, has a concrete understanding of space and time, creating and parsing trajectories of movement with precision in his paper airplane diagrams and installations.
(from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
CES Contemporary
Suite A
480 Ocean Avenue
Laguna Beach, California 92651 USA
(949) 547-1716
Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-5PM
Saturday, 9AM-3PM
and by appointment
Image:
Circle 3
by Lola Dupré
39.5″x39.5″
hand-cut collage on panel
2012
Courtesy of the artist and CES Contemporary