On Opacity

View of the exhibition “Kapwani Kiwanga: Safe Passage,” 2019, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.PHOTO PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER, CAMBRIDGE, GALERIE TANJA WAGNER, BERLIN, AND GALERIE POGGI, PARIS

IN SANDRA MUJINGA’S VIDEO Worldview (2021), a chilly pastoral scene plays for eight hours across three framed screens. Are we looking through a window? A portal? Mujinga shot the footage at the innermost part of the Norwegian fjords at Gudvangen (from the Old Norse for “a god’s place near the water”), an area in the west of the country where archaeologists have uncovered pagan Norse ritual sites. I never saw any creatures in Worldview, but Mujinga claims that little animals scamper about in the film and, occasionally, a sea monster shows a fin or two. Mujinga, who is influenced by Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, aims to depict a space where “gods, monsters and other beings with exaggerated humanoid bodies” are moving about in broad daylight, yet are also hidden from viewers. “The co-inhabitants of this world seem not to care about the watchers,” the press release accompanying the video’s recent presentation at Swiss Institute in New York states, “but nonetheless, they prefer not to risk too much visibility.” Visibility, here, might mean becoming vulnerable to predators who could capture, study, or ogle them without regard for their well-being. Here, time functions as a means of obfuscation. The video is so long that most viewers won’t see much of it. This is a way for her subjects to exist without the tyranny of a viewer.

In some ways, Mujinga’s video aptly exercises what the Martinican writer and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) called “the right to opacity.” In his final collection of essays, Philosophie de la relation (2009), Glissant described a stance intended to preserve all the nuances of one’s humanity amid forces, often colonial or imperialist, that seek to capture and flatten one’s subjectivity for easy legibility or categorization.

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Artist Shares Her Step-by-Step Process To Creating Hyperrealistic Pencil Portraits

When admiring a finished work of art, it can be challenging to comprehend all of the effort that went into making it. Or, how you could even create something like it for yourself. That is why UK-based artist Emma Towers-Evans documents her creative process in step-by-step images that reveal how she draws hyper realistic portraits using only graphite and charcoal.

As a self-taught artist, she has been honing her skills in pencil drawing since her teenage years. Now, she is well known for rendering celebrity and commission portraits in mind-boggling detail. The finished works resemble black-and-white photographs of the subjects, containing the fine texture of the skin, hair, and even makeup. “Each drawing takes somewhere in the region of 60-110 hours to complete, and I estimate there can be anywhere between 200,000 to 500,000 individual pencil strokes making up each drawing,” Towers-Evans tells My Modern Met.

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In Praise of Illegibility

Nadia Haji Omar, “December” (2017), ink and graphite on paper, 12 x 9 inches

There is a strain of abstract art that I don’t remember ever being the subject of an exhibition in New York, a city where more than 600 languages are spoken and written: asemic writing. An exhibition focusing on “writing without the smallest unit of meaning” could include works by Xu Bing, Henri Michaux, J. B. Murray, Cy Twombly, and Isidore Isou, founder of Lettrism. To this distinguished company, which transcends cultural boundaries, I would add Nadia Haji Omar, whose work I first wrote about in 2018.

Haji Omar, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, and raised in Sri Lanka, grew up learning different languages (Arabic, Sinhalese, Tamil, English, and French), some of which she studied after moving to the United States. 

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​​Atmospheric Forest Paintings Look Like There’s a Glitch in Their Pixels

Polish artist Luiza Niechoda simplifies landscapes with her pixelated style. Inspired by the Pacific Northwest and Romantic artists like Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, she creates striking renditions of verdant forests and misty mountainous backgrounds. Instead of focusing on the details, however, she prefers to use abstraction to home in on specific feelings.

Originally from a marketing and graphic design background, Niechoda decided to pursue painting full-time in 2018. Since then, her style has taken twists and turns, evolving from hyperrealistic windows covered in raindrops to expressive landscapes. “One of the big factors influencing my new style was definitely my education (I have an engineering degree in geodesy and cartography),” Niechoda explains. “I’ve decided I want my paintings to incorporate geometric shapes and my brushstrokes to be only vertical and horizontal.”

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Atmospheric Compositions

Dina Furrer is a Dutch photographer and visual artist based in Tilburg. Her varied portfolio largely comprises still lifes and landscapes; richly detailed works show bold experimentation with colour. Inspiration comes from within the artist herself as well as nature and everyday life. She recently participated in the exhibition H2O / Water at Galerie TON, Rucphen; past fairs include Art Eindhoven and EuropArtFair.

A: In Issue 105 of Aesthetica, we feature Blue Bird. What is the inspiration behind this piece?
DF: 
The idea came out of the blue. While creating this work I was inspired by an interesting combination of exotic from a documentary I watched plus blue light I’d seen somewhere that day. Also, I was in a peaceful mood and I think you can feel it when looking at the artwork.

A: What was the process behind the creation of Blue Bird and how did it differ from works such as Snowstorm and Gold Explosion?
DF: 
It was indeed very different. I was in a different point of my life with new interests. You can see it not only in the change of colours, but also the whole way of imagining the composition was something completely different.

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Disquiet In The Abstract: The 2022 Whitney Biennial

Ralph Lemon, Untitled, 2021, oil and acrylic on paper, 26 by 40 inches.

The most significant aspect of this year’s Whitney Biennial is its exhibition design. For the first time since 2016, the museum’s fifth floor has been restored to its Renzo Piano-designed primordial state, forgoing walls in favor of a field of fragmented, Tetris-like half-walls arranged in no discernible order or pattern, bookended by city and Hudson River views. The sixth floor, by contrast, is a funereal warren of black walls and black carpet: a “dark video hallway,” as my friend put it. It’s a mess. But bless this mess; it’s the biennial postponed because of a global pandemic, following the Black Lives Matter protests, and at the dawn of what feels like another world war. With “Quiet as It’s Kept,”curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards peer into the broken mirror of the past three years, gathering shards to figure out what just happened, and where to go from here.

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Vera Palme’s self-operating subjects

Vera Palme, Time Stamp Painting (1), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Braunsfelder.

Last year, I curated an exhibition at Arthub in Copenhagen, which included a dozen of paintings by Vera Palme. One night, I had plans to take a friend out for dinner, but I wanted to show her the exhibition first. We spent a long time in front of SOS (1), 2020, a large canvas depicting what I happen to know is a jade green Chinese vase picked out of the catalogue of an auction house, but which, in this rendition and as suggested by the title, Palme has instilled with a sense of alarm. The vase struggles to maintain itself against the mud-coloured background; brush strokes are whirring in and around it as if in panic. My friend suddenly had to leave, she’d lost her appetite. The painting had done something to her, gone to her gut and settled there as a feeling of disquiet—in the best way, she assured me—asking questions that could not be answered over dinner.

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Major Shows of Matisse Open This Year. Here’s a Refresher on the Essential Modernist Artist

Henri Matisse, Dance (I), 1909.

Ripe fruit, luxurious fabrics, comely women, a window with a view of an ultramarine sea: the world of Henri Matisse is one of pleasures. Along with fellow modernist Pablo Picasso, he is one of the giants of the 20th-century avant-garde, a perennial subject of blockbuster exhibitions whose cut-paper figures are among the most famous images in art history.

According to several recent biographies, he was also a workaholic, a depressive, and a frequent punching bag for the Parisian intellectual vanguard, which ran hot and cold on his paintings’ busy patterning and lush palette. (His stalwart frenemy Picasso, upon seeing Matisse’s full-bodied Blue Nude from 1907, apparently sneered “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design.”)

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Thornton Willis’s Aversion to Perfection

Thornton Willis, “Brooklyn Bridge” (1993), acrylic on canvas, 96 x 84 inches

I was not surprised to learn that the abstract artist Thornton Willis, who was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1936, the son of an evangelical minister, has never had a survey show in New York. He belongs to the group of largely unaffiliated artists living in downtown New York between the late 1960s and late ’70s, who worked to make a space for themselves in painting after Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, and the “death of painting,” when the art world was dominated by conceptual art and the anti-optical. Except for the eye-opening traveling exhibition, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 (2006), curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed’s input, the experimental abstraction of this decade has largely been overlooked. And even that show did not address the breadth of what was going on in abstraction during that period, as Thornton Willis’s Slat paintings were not included. 

The 21 abstract paintings in Thornton Willis: A Painting Survey, Six Decades: Works from 1967 – 2017, at David Richard Gallery’s uptown and new Chelsea location (uptown: April 4–May 13; Chelsea: March 30–May 13, 2022), convey a restless artist working within the domain of geometric abstraction who never developed a signature format.

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Artist Forages Fallen Flora and Arranges It Into Exquisite Portraits of Animals and Insects

Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue 井上 羅来 highlights natural connections in his stunning arrangements. Using found materials, he organizes leaves, petals, and twigs into the shapes of different animals, from scarlet birds to multicolored fish.

Before making these plant-based arrangements, Inoue practiced drawing, painting, graphic design, and sculpture. “Nature has always been a great source of inspiration and one gloomy day, it given me a sign,” he tells My Modern Met. “The rose bush in my backyard was getting rustled by the wind so I went outside and foraged the petals along with a few stems and leaves. I used those to make my very first floral insect sculpture which ultimately jump-started my floral creations that I am known for today.”

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