GREYNBOW

Untitled by Angelina Gualdoni 2007

Get ready kids, your new favorite Brooklyn Art Gallery has arrived!

Horse Trader Gallery is pleased to announce: GREYNBOW

The Inaugural Exhibition Featuring ANGELINA GUALDONI, BOB JONES and BRANDEN KOCH. Curated by Vincent Como.

Plus a special Opening Night performance by Uncle Woody Sullender

Saturday May 9, 6-10pm and by appointment

Greynbow is a discussion through contemporary painting about our experiences and how they affect our interpretation of what we observe. Paintings and objects with colors that have run together, bled out, or eroded have the power to blur the clarity of vision or belief, obscuring or subverting our preconceived notions of the two dimensional suspension we call painting and in doing so, create a new lexicon with which to dissect form, analyze content, and explore contextual relations.

If we consider the impact of Color on our existence and ability to describe/interact/absorb information, we use a standardized method of classification like the Munsell Color System, and the work of Albers or Itten, which stems from the interaction of the primary and secondary colors, or Newton's optics and the spectral colors of the rainbow created via light's refraction. Taking these as the given circumstances from which we divine and relay our experiences on a visual level we apply descriptors to/with our colors to further define ourselves and invoke a range of emotion like "blood red", "green with envy" or "cold blue", setting them apart from the myriad of other less psychically charged reds, blues or the like, which we might otherwise confuse them with. However, this serves a much deeper purpose, that of attempting to relay an experience or locate in time for another person the event or revelation of which we speak; to translate and effectively communicate through the imperfections of the human language a purely visual or sensory experience.

When Jorge Luis Borges recounted his experience of slowly going blind, he held on to the memory of colors, like the Yellow of the Tiger, as he slipped into a haze which he described not as a black, or true darkness, but a greyish green fog which he became plagued with, robbing him of sight, color, and along with the ability to perceive light, also the ability to experience darkness. This exhibition explores the nuances of our collective unconscious with artists who push the reading of said colors into another territory, a grey area if you will, where faded and stained canvases question the bold determinism of fully saturated pigments, to challenge the formality of color-structure and suggest a distant or foggy memory of what the color may have once evoked; where the buildup of color and form slowly take shape to imply spatial location, emotional heft, and forgotten histories. Deconstructing our relationship with both color and our memory or association with said color, brings us a better understanding of how our experiences feed into our reading of contemporary painting, and conversely how painting reflects our experiences back toward us.

Angelina Gualdoni's recent work abstracts the faded remains of once great landscapes and industrial civilizations, or catches their attempts at rebuilding. Through a layering and staining process she draws out from the canvas thin colors which quietly gel into shape, form and a suggestion of history. Prodding our unconscious to question if we know these locations, or have seen their likes before: “It's so familiar, was it in a photograph, or movie? Was it always tinged with a pink hue?” These queries cause us to wrestle with our memory, and translate our own experiences in order to sort through the information provided; a mystery that draws us ever closer toward the subtle entanglements of the work. http://www.angelinagualdoni.com/

Bob Jones creates the illusion of painting through the amassed debris field of the painter's studio. Empty buckets of paint with a residue from the color it once contained, or piles of sticks with dried paint on them once used to stir the same bucket lean against a wall, perhaps as totems to the actions of the Artist/Shaman, or a marker placed as a warning to the viewer: "This...is all that remains". Both homage to memory and trophy of the vanquished foe that is painting, Jones utilizes the mark of paint as the descriptor of, or patina from, the work's surroundings. Like a carpenter covered with residual sawdust, or a mechanic that can never seem to get the oil and grease to leave those crevices around the fingernails, Jones' works are the raw and unbridled results of the painter's materials, studio, and activity within that space, gently being guided or channeled into something new. http://www.bobjonespaintings.com/

Branden Koch challenges the viewer with paintings which reference the surroundings in which they are made as well as the process by which they take shape. Making use of the available means in his studio space Koch transfers color and image onto his paintings by absorbing wet paint either on the floor or another surface with a stretched canvas, resulting in a ghost image of that surface. Physically manifesting with multiple overlays and obscured by other marks, the paintings are constructed into fully realized compositions which rupture and venerate the history of Painting with nuanced allusions to the act of painting and properties of paint. http://www.brandenkoch.com/

Challenging the conventions of traditional American Folk Music Woody Sullender has transformed the art of the solo banjo into an improvisational voice. Like the oral traditions of families and cultures passed from generation to generation, Sullender culls through the history of his instrument and intermingles a contemporary understanding of folk, jazz, punk, noise and sound to revise, update, and re-contextualize familiar sound; breathing new life into the conventions of a familiar idiom and forging a path toward the next generation of music.

http://www.deadceo.com/unclewoody

Vincent Como is a New York Based artist (http://vincentcomo.com/home.html) and co-founder of the Horse Trader Gallery along with Chris Uphues.

Horse Trader Gallery

519 Grand St

2^nd Fl

Brooklyn, NY 11211

horsetradergallery@gmail.com