| TRISTAN URBAN INTIMATE NEUROSIS |

Tristan’s paintings are simple explorations of human characteristics, depicted and enhanced with the use of proportion and surreal ideas. His interest in how people perform in every day life informs his work: he exploits characteristics of a person’s self-projection such as the use of fashion, which he makes poignant in his paintings, whether in a humorous approach, or by use of composition. Tristan’s painting also has an interesting relation to photography, keeping a distance from photographic realism. Keeping a division between the two enables an important detachment from realism, creating space and leaving the viewer a chance to connect with the work.

In current developments, Tristan’s technical exploration has added larger, freer brushstrokes to help deconstruct the backgrounds, creating more space and allowing the viewers eye to pass around the piece easily as well as allowing figures to bounce off a simple background. The contrast between brush marks provides definition to the figurative painting and strengthens the surreal standing seen in the work.

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| REPRESET INSIDE OUT |

Pepa Prieto

“My personal history is tied to movement. Change accompanied me starting at a very early age. I was born in “El Albaicín”, the old city of Granada in southern Spain. At nine years old I was sent to England to attend boarding school. The task of learning a new language, 
the contrast of places, culture and living far away from my family lead me to develop a visual diary. This diary became the place where I could freely explore memory, imagination, identity, surroundings, emotions, human psychology and society. It was a place to empty out, freeze time, research, experiment, and tell. I think of my current work as a page or a scribble from this diary. In making a painting, I continue to narrate and investigate as I would in a diary. Each painting is a frozen moment, a detailed snapshot of my inner dialogue. As a narrative form and in terms of process, one painting often leads me to the next. From this, I can loosely derive a series and yet each painting stands as individual. The paintings are small fragments of my universes, virtual landscapes, jungles of vegetation, ritual objects, memory embodied in physical objects, emotional constructions, human rituals, patterns and colors from memory- things seen from the inside out. My paintings evince a kind of hybridity, commingling abstraction and representation.

Painting allows me to expand, change, and search new territories.”

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| MAGICAL OPTICAL PROGRESSION |

Magical colors, optical illusions, and familiar faces from our childhood transformed. Uplifting bright and cheerful pieces without a trace of irony. Michael Dotson’s work explores subject matter such as time progression, space, fluidity, deconstruction, symmetry in representational and abstract shape explorations. Dotson is focused on the life of color and pattern.

“Lately I’ve been painting off from Disney stills. I found this website that just has every frame of every Disney movie, and at first I just started looking at the website just for fun, as like a weird hobby, but then the older ones, the people who made them were some baller painters. And I just got really into them. I just got all the frames where the background didn’t change and collapsed them together.”

AKA ////////// Yeah We Having A Celebration, I Love to Stay High

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| JOHNNY PSYCH-OP ART PAINTINGS |

JOHNNY ABRAHAMS
b. 1979, Tacoma, WA, USA
Lives and works in New York

“Johnny Abrahams‘ lives and works in New York. His latest body of work consists of painstakingly painted op-art pieces. Working exclusively in black and white these large patterns are absolutely disorienting. Once the viewers eyes become accustomed to each piece, elaborate mazes dazzle the senses. “Johnny Abrahams’ panel paintings are made up of various relationships between pattern, shape, and composition, using only a single width of band in either black or white acrylic paint. A pattern is chosen for its impact on perception. Light is broken into its constituent colors, which move in opposition across the surface. Approaching a work, a design may appear subtly constructed of two tones or tone gradations; passed a threshold, these reduced elements become vibratory, destabilizing the fixed gaze of the eye.” -Ryan De La Hoz on beautiful/decay

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| STAIN FLOWERS DECAY PLANTS |

 

Frederik Akum, born 1987, raised in Kristinehamn, lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In Anticipation – Akrylic & vinyl . “A year ago, because of a house fire, I lost all of my plants. Since then, painting as monument has become a question that I consistently investigate. Portraying loss has similarities to trying to address desire or the sublime: The process begins with the realization that the game is already lost – to portray something unreachable is as unattainable as Utopia.”

 

 

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