November 17 - January 6, 2007
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present new work by Cheyney Thompson. As
a rejoinder to his previous exhibition (which took place at Daniel Buchholz
Gallery in Vienna in the summer of 2006) Thompson presents Certain Aspects
of Bourgeois Art: La Non-Intervention. For the exhibition entitled, The
End of Rent Control and the Emergence of the Creative Class, the following
press release was used:
"Cheyney Thompson (*1975), for his first solo exhibition in Germany
will present two series of four portraits depicting his conjugal landlords.
These portraits borrow from four-color (CMYK) printing techniques deploying
layers of transparency for the production of color images. This technical
function separates 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 propriety
for painting¼s claim to bear the weight of its own traditions.
Thompson¼s allegorical movement from forms of social propriety to figures
of aesthetic obsolescence is inverted in his large format painting ¼The Production
of an Unevenly Distributed Surplus Results from the Facticity of Format and
GroundÆ. This painting is made-up of a large impasto grid that served as an
imposing matrix. Thompson likens this image to contractual relations between
landlords and lessees. One lessee observes:
The representation of contractual relations between things often produces
the effect of an excess, a surplus in the margins of the contract¼s legal
conditions. Passed 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 CÕzanne 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".
In the context of New York City and given the ongoing vicissitudes of the
real estate market, the stable figure of the landlord seems quaint, if not
wholly irrelevant. Nonetheless, it seems that a speculative image, lacking
a coherent subject, could share attributes (materials, methodologies, and
techniques) with a series of portraits of a landlord. However, with the absence
of a central subject, it would seem inevitable that the disparate objects
on display would be subsumed into their more efficient ordering through brute
contemporaneity.
The organization of this heterogeneous set of objects, in order to lay claim
to an order that was not simply waiting for it in the gallery, would have
to anticipate that ordering and add or subtract something from it. Thus, in
this exhibition, a group of prints share materials and formal properties with
the French journal, Rhobo, which published the essay that the show
is named after. These prints also partake in values and terms which could
be said to belong to painting, i.e., composition and color. If the prints
have internalized the problems of painting, then the paintings in this exhibition
have absorbed printing protocols. Similarly, this technique of assigning numeric
values to color values is repeated in a series of tables which link aspects
of exhibition architecture (display forms) to aspects of the pictures on display,
while architecturally joining the exhibition space of the gallery to the storage
space.
The exhibition will be on view from November 17 - January 6, 2007. A reception
will be held for the artist at the gallery on November 17th from 6 - 8 PM
at 525 West 22nd St., New York City. For information call 212-741-8849.
1998
March 13-April 10, 2004
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present "1998," an exhibition of new paintings by Cheyney Thompson. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
"1998" is a panoramic installation of more than 130 paintings, spanning three walls of the gallery. Painted in acrylics on stretched, raw linen, all of the paintings on a single wall share a common vanishing point. In the direct center of the gallery is a bunker constructed of sandbags and white plastic casts of wooden planks which complicates access to the optimal viewing point, offering this "white cube" as a contestable place.
While Thompson's previous exhibitions have often referenced painting practice by way of a dialogue with specific paintings - most recently, Gericault's Raft of The Medusa for his exhibition "1816" at Sutton Lane in London. With "1998," the artist refers to a time during which he "helped establish an artist-run gallery which facilitated the conception of itself as a specifically public and temporary autonomous site which could stand in opposition to the logic of markets." The paintings reference barricades and provisional architecture constructed from rusty corrugated metal, pieces of drywall and chipboard, and pieced-together 2x4s. While these paintings are purposefully fragmentary, the exhibition itself is offered as a theater in which to consider the incomplete in a temporarily coherent way.
1 Scenario + 1 Situation
June 7-July 6, 2002
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present new work by Cheyney Thompson. The exhibition will consist of two projects that together investigate the possibilities of thinking through objects, and more specifically the organization of objects. "In reorganizing the debris of our daily lives my desire is to reconfigure the ways in which I think about the social landscape and to create a work of art that is useful for comprehending this landscape, not an image of repressive forces, but the possibilities for reconfiguration of those forces."
"1741" is the third in a series of still-life paintings which seek to psychically commune with the long dead painter Jean-Babtiste Simeon Chardin. Chardin's pictures of the 1730s and 40s often depict children in the moment of apprehending. The spinning of a top, the building of a card house, the blowing of a bubble, reveal moments where knowledge is experienced through the sense of touch and under the spell of the gaze. In "1741" Thompson tries to make a new type of history painting, one which, while emptying out the depicted narrative leaves in tact the trace of a constructed world organized by hidden laws, and ultimately seeks to place things in proper perspective.
Inspired by Alfred Doblin's great novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz in which the story's principle character Franz Biberkoph spends much of his time as a street peddler, Thompson has set up tables in the gallery that replicate vendor tables found on Canal Street. "This book helped me see an image of the city, of any city, which revealed the overwhelming forces which restrict the psychology of the city's inhabitants, forces that are constantly held at bay by the spectacle of representation. The miniature folding tables are part of an ongoing project to make a diorama of Canal Street, one in which the forces that culminate to create this situation have the hiccups, allowing for breaks within an overwhelming and unknowable order."
The
exhibition will be on view from June 7 - July 6, 2002. A reception will be
held for the artist in the gallery on June 7 from 6 - 8 PM at 516 West 20th
St., New York City. For information call 212-741-8849.
