Chancing With the Stars
Matias Cuevas, Rob Davis, Max Warsh
Cuevas Tilleard Pop-Up, May 29– June 1, 2014
CHANCING WITH THE STARS
Matias Cuevas, Rob Davis, Max Warsh
May 29 - June 1, 2014
CUEVAS TILLEARD PROJECTS is pleased to present Chancing with the Stars, an exhibition of work by Matías Cuevas, Rob Davis, and Max Warsh.
The exhibition brings together three artists whose creative processes break down the ordinary in the pursuit of abstraction, and confront the aesthetics of the everyday. Routinely performed actions like drinking, walking, and shopping are used as a starting point towards art making - as an opportunity to create space and seize the moment. The artists allow chance to stand at the center of their practice, playfully letting it take over their experience, bridging the abstract with the concrete.
The diverse selection of work in the exhibition is centered on the way each artist explores the traditional limits of painting, pushing the structural boundaries between the material, the surface and the process of application. Although diverse in their material and aesthetic choices, the work brings to play a common sense of gesture and movement, and a shared interest in modernity that makes for a fluid and nonchalant conversation about contemporary painting and art making in general.
Matías Cuevas draws from the tradition of painting as well as from his subconscious and everyday experiences. After having an epiphany at a hardware store, he created an innovative technique of staining and setting fire to nylon carpet with paint thinners. Embracing abstraction, chance, and materiality, each painting is an orchestrated performance where alchemically altered textures and idyllic washes of color materialize to completely transform the everyday.
Rob Davis’ work comes out of his routines. Starting with the materials of domestic architecture, he then ‘paints’ them with the materials of the everyday - coffee, beer, cleaning products. The work is further enriched in its incorporation of materials strongly bonded to the history of Renaissance oil painting. Linen, hemp and oil stick mingle with bourbon, leather and cigarette ash. The outcome is a varied series of gestural abstractions.
Max Warsh begins his creative process by walking. He chances upon his compositional elements by wandering New York taking photographs of the repeating patterns found in built architecture - in tiles, brick, and concrete blocks. From there, he returns to the studio to cut, paste and paint, grounding his works in the purposeful practice of geometric abstraction. Tempered yet mesmerizing, these works simultaneously reveal and destroy the architectonic patterns of the everyday.
The artists will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, May 29 from 6:30 to 9:30 PM.