Follow the White Cube

Honold Fine Art is pleased to present Follow the White Cube, the second pop up show of HFA in Ubud, Bali from 26 November–15 December 2016.

The exhibition brings together artworks of eight artists: Jumaldi Alfi, Ashley Bickerton, Marco Cassani, Fendry Ekel, Bepi Ghiotti, Yusra Martunus, Filippo Sciascia and Narcisse Tordoir.

According to its modus operandi, Honold Fine Art choses a new context where to locate the show: an artist’s studio. During the period of the exhibition the artworks are displayed inside the studio of one of HFA’s Bali based artists.

Inserting Follow the White Cube into the artist’s studio, where usually the artistic process is taking place, the exhibition wants to reflect on the concept of the metaphorical white cube as a specific typology of the exhibition space and raise questions about public/private dichotomies. Is the exhibition incorporating the artist’s studio, this ‘mysterious locus of the creative act’ or vice versa?

OPENING: November 26, 2016 at 5 pm
Studio Filippo Sciascia
Jalan Nyuh Kuning 9, Ubud, Bali

info@honoldfineart.com

Jumaldi Alfi is painting mostly on large canvases and in acrylic. He unfolds his respective subject matter in series; the painting in this exhibition actually being a combination of two. The figuration derives from Myth Sisyphus, Nightwalker; a series, in which a figure shown from behind metaphorically stands for the persona of the artist, his creative struggle, the burden of consciousness and his outsider role within society. The execution of the painting follows Alfi’s Blackboard Series, in which the artist positions painting, or rather art history, as a never ending lesson to be learned from.

Ashley Bickerton for the first time is showing two bold and seductively beautiful female torso sculptures (Things), which have served as models for his neo-baroque painting cycle Woman. The augmented eyes and mouth are cast resin inserts in toxic colors and – like in the paintings – hint at oral and visual consumption and maybe even social excess. It has been observed that, with their high cheekbones and voluptuous mouths, the female portraits also resemble the artist’s own features, which would add a certain degree of self-parody, familiar from other works of the artist. Bickerton resides in Bali since 1993, where he sought rest and inspiration after having it hit very big in New York City. Today he travels extensively and exhibits worldwide, his oeuvre already being an important piece in the art historical canon.

Marco Cassani in the exhibition Follow the White Cube presents his new work Fountain (Gunung Kawi). The work consists of 1200 foreign and Indonesian coins stacked on top of each other to form a 205 cm high column. For one year the artist employed one fountain, located in a Balinese temple, and collected the coins that tourists and locals had thrown into the water, while making a wish. Creating a visual epitome for the accumulating of money, the artist simultaneously destroys the coins’ monetary value. As an artwork, however, the object will be valued anew. Marco Cassani’s work reflects on our economic system; in particular on the precarious state of inter human agreement, and the subtle distinction between trading and economy, (i.e. creating value) which is the very base of cultural production.

Fendry Ekel has been dubbed a pictor doctus, whose ethos is to investigate through painting the pictures he deals with in order to understand. His subject matter revolves around the relation between ‘man and memory’. His dark and multilayered oil painting Common Ground in this show is depicting an iconic object in art history – the American flag – in completely unexpected black and white hues, painted after a photograph that he took during his residency program in New York. Next to his figurative paintings Ekel develops a series of wall pieces: mirrors in stainless steel. Carrying enigmatic titles like The Missing Link, Atlas, or, in this exhibition Death around the Corner, these objects operate as two dimensional surfaces of reflection and projection at the same time, connecting them closely to the nature of the medium of painting.

Bepi Ghiotti considers his work 500W (two Kodak carousel projectors, chargers, wall projection) 2016, a ‘universal installation.’ Inside a room two adjacent squares of pure light asynchronously hit the wall. Exhibition location and installation enter a complementary mode of dialogue and negotiation. Taking away their function as image transporting vehicles, Ghiotti amplifies the projectors’ signifying potential: He turns them into generators of light, which delineate space and provide a continuous mechanical soundtrack played by the ventilation coolers and the empty magazines’ rhythmic rotation. In Follow the White Cube the projection of light slowly disappears with the upcoming sun to gradually reappear at dusk 12 hours later, a process which can be observed on the glass wall of the exhibition space from the outside.

Yusra Martunus mostly works in three dimensions, drawing his subject matter from our empirical experience with objects, either natural or man-made. In this exhibition he is showing one of his wall sculptures going by the title, or rather quasi-industrial code ‘07106N’. Between two readymade IKEA ‘Bjarnum’ brackets from the catalog series of industrial pre-products, an organic sensual form, evoking various kinds of associations, is firmly held in place. Its glossy, immaculate white surface recalls the dynamic, streamlined visual language of product design, while at the same time outspokenly denying any kind of functionality. By using the universal language of the ‘world of things and products’, which, since industrialization has become our second nature, Yusra Martunus manages to address the viewer’s experiences and expectations in a very direct and emotional way.

Filippo Sciascia, best known for his ongoing painting series Lux Lumina, is showing a three dimensional work from his recent solo exhibition Matahari. A carefully constructed readymade Balinese ‘Tutuan’ from bamboo, normally serving as a temporary addition to the stone temple for holding more offerings, is accommodating one of Filippo Sciascia’s paintings. Attached to the temporary fixture on eye level below the space for the offerings, the artist adresses the strong relation between Hindu religion and the Balinese tradition of painting. In an evolution, which seems to be inspired by natural processes of growth and change, he establishes aesthetic connections, which are complex, not easily recognizable as a style and metaphorical for the relations that exist everywhere in empirical reality if one decides to look for them.

Narcisse Tordoir is showing paper collages from the two work cycles Unos A Otros (2009) and The Pink Spy (2013). Both projects were beginning with a research period, resulting in a setting for a shoot, developed in collaboration with other creative talent and photographer Ronald Stoops. The works are stories full of bravado, simultaneously subtle and in the face, weaving romance with harsh reality, history with contemporaneity, moving pictures with static ones, and madness with seriousness. Tordoir practices painting as an act; a performance that continues to resonate. His language is associative, intrusive and mysterious yet with great formal precision. The elements, recognizable in themselves, are combined in a way which creates tension and opens up a semantic field of emotion, disrupting our ordinary ways of seeing and consistently off-footing the viewer.