New York – Lower East Side – Thursday, January 23, 2014
TONIGHT: FADO: the last man The artwork of GG (Gabriel Gimenez)
7-10 PM – Thursday, Jan 23, 2014 Castle Fitzjohns Gallery -98 Orchard St, Ny, Ny 10002
Castle Fitzjohns Gallery is pleased to announce the latest exhibition from
international pop-artist, Gabriel Gimenez (b 1991), or GG, ‘Fado: the last man‘.
Born in Venezuela, based in Miami, but exhibiting from Milan to Berlin, Los
Angeles to New York, this 23-year-old sensation redefines the role of the cultural
icon with his own. Warhol, Basquiat, Wonder woman, and Batman: at the end of
history, GG uses an original caricature, Fado, to explore at the intersection of
personal memoir, popular culture, and a rugged street aesthetic, exemplifying a
playful, but at times dark ethos of ‘confusion and curiosity’—by an artist not
emerging, but ever emergent—at the forefront of art and design.
Undeniably the most successful emerging pop artist out of Miami today, GG self
describes as a composite and mercurial figure: at once a visual artist, designer,
and muralist. Commercially inflected, but deeply culturally relevant, GG’s
concern lies in the development and exploration of a hopeful anxiety—that of
attempting to understand contemporary human experience whilst ever trapped
in its milieu. On this journey, GG develops the character of ‘Fado’—an
interpretation of stories told to the artist as a child by his father, and, moreover, a
trademark character which the artist employs to undo the mythos behind the
heroic promises of popular culture.
Though not renouncing the onus of the contemporary artist to probe the abyssal
depths of a psycho-somatic apocalyptical mindset which is that of culture in the
wake of history (whether après 9/11, après financial crisis or so forth), GG’s
visually sharp contrasts express what Alex Williams of the New York Times called a
more probing propensity of artists from Miami, a city abundant with stories of
hope and migration, a reflection of the “tendency of locals to behold this city of
sharp contrasts (racial, economic) as a palm-dotted land of opportunity”. Yet
iconographic impulse of GG’s work, existing within the liminal space between art
and design, cartoon and critique, pushes further into the contemporary moment
than the overtly celebratory image making of his predecessors.
Born of the heritage of Miami’s Soflo Superflat movement, a cultural and regional
adaptation of the Japanese artist Takahashi Murakami’s self-proclaimed
Superflat movement itself, and revealing similar qualities of heavy outline, flat
color planes, and above all, the development of an idiosyncratic visual
vocabulary through the use of repetitive imagery. ‘Fado’ is not simply a
character, but a new way of speaking back to a(n) (art) world and culture
whose heroic past both delights and disappoints a new generation looking
towards an uncertain future with both hesitance and exuberance. GG’s
creations express the rough edged experience of street art, coupled with a
persistent desire to hold fast to the at once hopeful and deflated reveries of
childhood naiveté.
I wrote about GG’s last NYC show on Artsucks.com (read here).
Posted by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”
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