EXPO CHICAGO 2023

Udo Nöger’s (Germany) abstract white paintings call upon a powerful yet simple source,  light. Nöger developed a technique that creates the effect of light emanating from within the canvas. His paintings require (3) layers mounted on stretchers that are spaced apart. It is the middle layer which contains his mythological, figural forms. Whereas the outer, third layer is treated with mineral oil in order to project a translucency that perceptually “pushes” the figure to the foreground. His paintings are ephemeral. They depend upon the time of day and the quality of light to experience them. Thus, they never appear the same, seemingly shifting in coloration, even though they are painted in white and gray tones.

Lole Asikian (Argentina) A play of lights, shadows and absences that are captured in the work creating a dream scene. The intensity and disenchantment of the linear remains in the image; life begins to take a circular shape, not everything is lost.

Dirk Salz (Germany) see himself as a painter first, a sculptor second. However, his work imbues a tension between the two – embracing a dichotomy between the visual and spatial fields. Forgoing the figural, the pieces themselves are paradoxically object and reflection. They position the viewer within the work. Salz’s carefully laid resin paintings are a result of a laborious process of pouring, smoothing, masking, and polishing to achieve something that is both built up by hand and machine labor. Yet for all their construction, they create a mirrored veil of the world around them. Surface and depth lie at the heart of Salz’s work; thus, his pieces are created horizontally yet are experienced vertically.

Loris Cecchini (Italy) embraces the biomorphic. He studies nature – not in the purely pictorial sense, but rather in the rhizomatic sense – of rhythm, fluctuation and (re)organization. He observes nature and translates it unabashedly through a tectonic, constituting a science-like aesthetic. His work materially substitutes the organic for the inorganic, or vice-versa, thereby reframing our relationship to the known world. Cecchini makes this world through highly crafted creations. Utilizing 3D software and fabrication, his works often inflate the microscopic to large scale installations of for example, “developed seeds,” or alternately miniature depictions of enormous landforms. In the end, his work poetically questions the strict divisions between the natural and artificial.

Jose Bechara’s (Brazil) paintings paradoxically embrace and subvert a genre of Minimalism. Interlocking stripes offset one another, not by mere contrast but rather by materials and tone. As opposed to monochromatic colorations, he deploys lines of saturated pigments alternating with steel oxidation. Each painting is constructed using the fabric of old tarps instead of new canvas. These tarps once protected highway cargo. Bechara plays with these histories, both sacred and profane, injecting a re-reading or better yet, new reading of geometry. One does not simply see the patterns – one feels them. Bechara deconstructs the idealized conceptual aspects of minimalist geometries in favor of a materialist, process oriented, and ultimately sensorial approach.

Daniel Domig (Austria) rounds the group with a return to figural painting. However, Doming’s figures are never quite complete. They are always in a state of flux, either within their environment, and/or with other bodies. They are as we are today – struggling to break free of over-stimulation, looking for a moment of respite. Thus, Domig’s subjects are seemingly isolated, in a hyperspace world of color and movement, suggesting a blur between subject, object, and space itself. Domig often refers to the technologies of literature, as in the plastic approach in the language of Samuel Beckett, or the lyrical constructions of T.S. Eliot.

Adétòmíwá A. Gbadébò (Nigeria) He uses his Yorùbá heritage and life experiences to create his pieces based on emotions and the journey that life stitches; he embodies a spiritual trance while he creates. He does not associate himself with any artistic movements; for it is with the guidance of Olódùmarè that he executes his messages. As multiple ideas develop in his conscious and unconscious mind, they evolve into languages of spiritual prowess, guided by Orishas (Yorùbá spiritual ancestors), Olódùmarè (Yorùbá creator of all beings on earth) and Ifá philosophy (Yorùbá religious concept), with the inclusion of his global travels.

Fabiano Parisi (Italy) Supernova is the explosion of a star. It is the largest explosion that takes place in space. A star is in balance between two opposite forces, it’s a balance of gravity pushing in on the star and heat and pressure pushing outward from the star’s core. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it cools off. This causes the pressure to drop. Gravity wins out, and the star suddenly collapses. The collapse happens so quickly that it creates enormous shock waves that cause the outer part of the star to explode. The Supernova photo project take inspiration from this concept as an "explosion" of energy and colors, with a visual balance between different forces as still and motion, sharp and blur, realistic and abstract. Each photo is digitally hand painted with broad strokes of color, giving movement and energy in contrast to the still architecture's space, that become fluid and in motion.

Daniel Verbis (Spain)  The series of collages entitled La ley de la Selva is significant on three planes: iconographically (through the abstraction of images of natural life: the entanglement of vegetation and the jungle on the one hand, the framework of the chrysalis on the enveloping mode by another), in the cultural one, (referring to the classicism of the draping and the informalism of the visual texture), and in the plastic, (using the mechanization of the action painting of the serigraphic backgrounds and more specific processes in the painted elements that have been added). In this series of collages each fragment seeks its own depth. The visual planes, when superimposed, build a space that justifies the background-figure relationship and its centrality. In this series, the space simultaneously accommodates the visceral body and the vegetable body, the geography of the skin (shells and cross sections of vegetable tissues) and the entanglement of the landscape, the rugged geography of the visual textures and the aqueous shine of the pleated surfaces, the translucent gesture that is drawn in the silence of time and the ramified delirium of the vegetal vein. The overlapping of planes makes the unfolded gesture an exercise in transparency. The overlapping of the languages ​​makes the voluminous chiaroscuro superimposed on the background lattice look like a painting of the skin.

Santiago Villanueva (Spain) Art is linked to the intimate experience of the body and time, to the search for an interior portrait with beauty as the essential interlocutor. As Barthes would say, "a slight fold in which the page of life, the silk of language, has been pinched." Nothing remains stable, there is a changing equilibrium, transitions that describe the play of internal forces and advocate what is about to happen. Actions captured in the process of transformation, and that suggests an inherent inertia to development, will or encouragement. Actions that can only be interpreted by the senses. The work is not intended to provoke simple visual pleasure or tactile experience. Its reason is to stimulate desire, seduce us until we penetrate sensually into the object and perceive the emotion it proposes from a more intimate, more subjective place. From the duality provided by the language of the senses and the language of matter, the work is defined and constructed. An industrial skin epidermis as a materialization of internal organic emotions is the paradox chosen as a narrative tool.