Snubbing the Earth: Matías Duville’s Vertices of Time at Barro Gallery New York.

Caída del peñón, 2024, Acrylic and polyurethane on wood, 15 67/100 × 20 7/25 in

In a recent conversation at Barro Gallery in New York, the Sue and Eugene Mercy assistant curator Ana Torok (MoMA, prints and drawings), likened Matías Duville’s artistic process to “throwing a lance” at the canvas. Indeed, Duville is not kind to his materials. His artistic oeuvre is replete with scratched metal and burned wood. For his paper works, charcoal is inflicted, not applied. When I had the good fortune to speak with the artist about his current exhibition at Barro Gallery, Vertices of Time, I asked what kinds of materials he had used for his paintings. One material stuck out as particularly harsh: “heat gun.”

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The Sublimity of Simplicity in Dai Ban’s Sculptures

On view at Carrie Haddad Gallery through November 26

Artist Profile
A person in a striped shirt

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The Artist in his Studio, Great Barrington, MA. Image Credit: Matt Moment

When Dai Ban first traveled from his native Japan to the United States, he was struck by the nonchalant vibrance of American street art. The year was 1985, and although the golden age of graffiti had come and gone, its ethos had indelibly permeated the fine art world. Imagery that had been considered lowbrow just ten years prior became astronomically salable, so long as it decorated a canvas and not a subway car. Ban was bemused by the transformative power of gallery spaces. “Anything you show at the gallery looks like some kind of art,” he observed.

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