“Money is abstraction par excellence” - Amelia Groom, Art Historian
The Opening Gallery is pleased to present "To Live With Great Beauty: The Julia and Peter Archer Collection" a solo exhibition by Brian Block curated by Sozita Goudouna, PhD. The exhibition takes form as an immersive installation in the aesthetic order of the auction preview show presenting six autonomous paintings and two sculptures from Block's new "Ciphers" series. The Ciphers are new forms of painterly and sculptural abstractions which are conceptually founded in relation to financial abstractions.
Each Cipher work finds its origins in the artist's careful consideration and repurposing of choice factual details of a selected auctioned lot. The dimensions of the auctioned work provide the impetus into material realization. In the paintings these dimensions are rendered at 100% to scale in white paint on a field of pre-primed canvas, also of a white hue. In the Cipher sculptures, the dimensions of each auctioned sculpture is captured in a sealed volume of space for presentation within carefully created vitrines. According to Block, "the Ciphers are not homages or copies, they replace the auctioned artwork with the idea of it," thus, by elevating selected facets of the seemingly dormant auctioned lots into a new form of painterly and sculptural abstraction, Block severs the pictorial qualities of the auctioned lot from its financial dimensions to propose new modes of consideration.
The sculptural Ciphers which inhabit vitrines-as-sculptural-forms, are shaped by the artist's engagement with the "staging of the pictorial event" in art. Parallel to the ways in which the staging of works in an auction showroom shapes the reception of the works soon to be for sale, the vitrine as a sculptural form occupies a important place in the history of art and its display. This sculptural language of vitrine-structured abstraction may invoke a lineage of artists known for innovations in this realm: Paul Thek, Jeff Koons and Mark Dion, most notably. However, the move engagement of Block's work with abstract financial immateriality eludes any reliance on its antecedents.
Importantly in this creative matrix, Block connects his abstract works to financial considerations while occluding selected facts of each auction lot such as the artwork title, the artist name, date, provenance, buyer name. The selected pieces of information Block retains tellingly find their mention in the titles. What remains are words placing an emphasis on the material dimension of their absence: oil on canvas, notations of signatures, dedications, often the sold price in the currency of its sale.
However, the question about the significance of the term Cipher and the artist's selected term of titling the works in this series remains. The origins of the term are found in the Arabic notions of the number zero, a numerical abstraction critical to the history of ideas. In our time, cipher denotes a non-entity or empty vessel which is at once a thing and a denoted vacant space to be occupied in the future by an as yet unknown entity or identity. "A Cipher is something which is at once an entity - almost transparent, almost a non entity - which can hold our projections lightly." according to Block. A curator recently argued using the noted comment by Rothko that "there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing," and Block added "it depends upon which nothing one is referring to."
The exhibition marks the second project by Brian Block engaging financialization and its related perceptual shifts, following his "Notes of F. Wott: File 12: On Money" of 2022. This street-posted print project is driven by a compendium of thoughts and ideas on what Block as called financial perception: "the influence of financial values as they are directed upon other forms of reality."
Brian Block's work derives from original research into the language, ideology, and reality production methods of chosen "perceptual authorities." His work often involves repurposing the results of his research into art as a "form of counter knowledge." He lives and works in NYC and studies at SVA and the Whitney Independent Study Program. A full bio can be found at brianblockstudio.com
Brain & Body: Reunited
Costas Picadas
February 15 - March 5, 2023
Opening Thursday, February 5, 6-8PM
The Opening Gallery
42 Walker Street, New York
The Opening Gallery is pleased to announce Brain & Body Reunited, a solo exhibition of works by Costas Picadas. Installed across the first floor of 42 Walker St, the exhibition attempts to challenge our perception of the relationship between mind and body as well as our mental processes or brain-states with an arrangement of corporeally provoking art pieces, connecting with the Opening Gallery’s focus on the interface between the arts and biomedical sciences.
Contemplating the notion of the brain as a mechanism – a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation – the exhibition offers different viewpoints about the brain and its million neurons by centering neurodiversity as the fundamental concept about how we can understand the physical and biological origins of human emotion in the brain, as well as the conception, exhibition, and reception of the artworks.
The relationship between mind and body has kept Western philosophers occupied for millennia. Ancient Greek Philosophers like Plato formulated a dialectic that argued that knowledge, and reason were a distinct entity from the physical body while genetic empiricists like Aristotle supported different views. Centuries later the notion of normality in terms of the medical examination of the mind also changed while René Descartes (1596–1650) founder of modern philosophy and science envisioned a dualistic model that positioned the rational, free-will that enables voluntary actions as a separate entity from the machine-like body, which drives automatic reflexes.
Currently we notice an on-going parallel between the ‘visualization of the brain’ in the scientific and in the artistic domains and a fascination with the visualization of the neurons, but how can this visualization help us understand the invisible synapses of the brain and its relationship with the body.
Addressing philosophical questions of mental representation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Costas Picadas’ meticulous visualization of organs and his fascination with our colorful but also black and white brain and body challenges dualistic models of thought while he investigates the ways human societies can resist mind control with actual free will.
Further to the notion of mind control, current scientific research attempts to illuminate the biological nature of our inner worlds and our “projections” namely the ways aspects of the self are experienced by the individual as residing outside the self (Deisseroth K.). Drawing from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, and his claim that “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make humans the true masters of creation, that their most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of their own brain,” the exhibition attempts to trace the visualization of the brain's inner circuitry with a deep empathy for mental illness.
With this body of work Picadas’ interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of the Body/Mind problem by exploring the philosophical question of how, as creatures with minds and bodies, we represent – and misrepresent actual and possible worlds. The revolutionary field of optogenetics allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light, however, we still seem to know little about the human mind and certain theorists argue that it is much too complicated to be controlled, while brain and electrostimulation experiments of the 60s and 70s were often unable to clarify which parts of the brain are stimulated by stimoceivers or electro-magnetic radiation. Cajal ventured into science as both an artist and a pathologist, while he became the first person to see a neuron. The scientist visualized the inner workings of the mind with thousands of stunning pen-and-ink diagrams and his exquisite, meticulous drawings of neurons in the brain and spinal cord proved that every neuron in the brain is separate and that neurons communicate across synapses.
At the same time contemporary art replicates, relocates, and often rewires the body for additional capabilities while electronically augmented or internet enabled internal organs might have a better function in the biological worlds. At present we can engineer additional, external organs to better interface with the technological terrain that we now inhabit. Nonetheless, Picadas’ solo exhibition reminds us that it is now and again instructive to turn our gaze from our immediate technological present where our mind and body are often taken apart and ponder for a moment their poetic reunification.
About the Artist:
Costas Picadas studied art at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts and art history at the Louvre School in Paris. Picadas’ oeuvre has been exhibited at Queens Museum- Bulova NY, Paris Kohn Gallery NY, Denise Bibro Gallery NY, The Blender Gallery Athens GR, Donopoulos Gallery GR, Gallery Gransart Paris, Mykonos Biennale Greece, The Young Art Fair in Switzerland, Gallery J&J Donguy Paris, Some Young New Yorkers III at PS1 NY, Kappatos Gallery, Athens, GR, Gallery de Buci Paris, Gallery Anatole Chartres, France, Gallery de Nest Paris, Salon de Montrouge, Paris, W.G. Amsterdam, Holland, and the Festival of Avignon, France among other cultural venues.
Articles, reviews, and critical analysis of Picadas’ work appear in solo, and group show catalogues in addition to esteemed newspapers and magazines in France, Greece and New York, such as Zing Magazine, Absolute Arts, New York Spaces, White hot, Flash Art among other. Since 1994 he is based in New York City.