Cheyney Thompson (*1975), for his first solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz will present two series of four portraits depicting his conjugal landlords. These portraits borrow from four-colour (CMYK) printing techniques which deploy layers of transparency for the production of color images. This technical function seperates the subjects of his work into sets of numeric information. In these works, the uncanny effect of virtuosic painterly technique results from an otherwise systematically deskilled procedure of image production. The disinvested image of the landlord comes to constitute a figure of impropriety for painting's claim to bear the weight of its own traditions.
Thompson's allegorical movement from forms of social propriety to figures of aesthetic obsolescence is inverted in his large format painting The Production of an Unevenly Distributed Surplus Results from the Facticity of Format and Ground. This painting is made-up of a large impasto grid that serves as an imposing matrix. Thompson likens this image to contractual relations between landlords and leasees. One leasee observes:
The representation of contractual relations between things often produces the effect of an excess, a surplus in the margins of the contract's legal conditions. Past from generation to generation, if not property itself, then the potential for its management, if not that then the facilitation (reproduction) of a future for the ghostly material relation that is bound by the contract: 'Here the deed is done, it was done a long time ago, (now give me the keys).; (Sam Lewitt)
Along with these paintings several other works will be exhibited including seventeen computer drawings that attempt to plot differences and common points between a series of Cezanne drawings executed after the central figure of Bellona in Rubens' The Apotheosis of Henry IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Medicis on May 14, 1610.
Press release courtesy Galerie Buchholz.
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