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 painting’s claim to bear the weight of its own traditions.
Thompson’s allegorical movement from forms of social propriety to figures
of aesthetic obsolescence is inverted in his large format painting ’The Production
of an Unevenly Distributed Surplus Results from the Facticity of Format and
Groundç. 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 contract’s 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 CÃzanne 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.
