Elisa

Werfel's dazzling abstractions convey a sense of lively vibrancy that instinctively takes the gaze to dance on the canvas, while retracing the artist’ movements and gestures in making it. 

Showing similarities to great masters of abstraction as Joan Mitchell, Gina Werfel's distinctively physical approach to painting let the forms and shapes to emerge and manifest themselves from the signs and chromatic atmosphere created by the colors in moving on the canvas. 

There’s clearly a certain level of improvisation closer to music, in this kind of compositions, but also a need to contain and control the effects that the color masses can offer, through the layering, and the contrast between the stenciled and hand-drawn marks she will later apply on the canvas. 

Those signs and marks work as accents or commas, that establish some firm point where the viewer’ gaze can stop, while going over the canvas and dancing on it without getting trapped in the color vortices. 

In this way, the  artist explores the world of color and signs through restless experimentation, which always preserve  a precise sense of aesthetic balance. 

It’s quite clear that Gina Warfel has no interest in establishing any specific subjects or can determine a specific reading of  the work: the main center of all her practice is the gesture of the color masses, and the narrative moments that can differently spark on the canvas for the viewer, while reacting with his memories. 

Warfel paintings,  as most of the classical  music, work through allusions and chromatic sensations that tickle the senses, without guiding them to any univoque response. 

Born in Havana, Cuba, for Eduin Fraga painting is an inherently political gesture, as representing the reality around and our time is indeed already about offering a specific perspective and reading on it. 

In the dialectics between the painter and the viewer, in fact, there’s already an exchange of positions, a negotiation of potentially different beliefs and views, encouraging a critical confrontation about what is represented. 

Fraga seems to be perfectly aware of this fact, in capturing dynamic fragments of society within his works by  blending newspaper collage and paint on the canvases.

In fact, with a unique technique that perfectly combines and integrates the two, the artist incorporates in his paintings local newspapers as well as from other parts of the world and other languages, physically bringing into his canvases the harsh reality of current global events. In this sense, electing to avoid any traditional idea of mimesis Fraga doesn’t represent, but rather concretely and materially present, today’ reality.

Despite his seemingly cartoon and illustrative style, this makes figurative paintings more than present, more than real, as alternatives to the representation of the same reality offered by the media. 

In fact, many experts of semiotics and visual studies have commented on the risk that the endless duplication and remediation of images of current events,, may eventually result in making these images ineffective, less real, regardless of  how dramatic or tragic they can be. As suggested by W. J. T. Mitchell, one of the most important scholars of visual culture and iconology,  today images of war, poverty, suffering are mostly destined to a detached consumption of the viewer that, in this constant flux, has already lost the sense of their real context, meaning and implications. For that reason, they can be easily manipulated, especially  if accompanied by strategic words and headlines  that can strongly influence  their reading. 

In contrast with all that, Fraga pictures appropriate the medium itself  (newspapers) to build a more personal but more sympathetic narrative, while also unveiling how different media, in different languages, may already offer more than one version of the same news. 

In this sense, his works can be considered strong statements on specific socio political situations, exemplifying the complicated entanglement of events, daily life, global media narration, and impacts on people daily lives that connects his home country's current dramatic situation as well as his experience of the United States to today’ global politics. 

There’s this tension between seeing, remembering, and dissolving, in the work of David Downs.

His monothones paintings represent fragments of reality eradicated from their context, and by focusing on psychologically charged details. 

There’s a melancholic tone of desolation, in most of these images, that usually characterize something lost. In fact, these images appear on the canvas as fragmented memories do in our head, when we try to dig into what is gone. 

As the details progressively dissolve with time, we try to save the general impressions and emotions surrounding these shadows from being submerged by the oblivium. 

Sometimes Downs bends on the canvas also some found objects and fragments from the material  world, creating complex existential assemblages which seek to give substance to these memorial images. 

Titles are also highly evocative, activating and suggesting all a series of meanings for the viewer in approaching these images, and interiorizing them.