Steven Carrelli: TEASER, TORMENTOR, AND SCRIM
@ Epiphany Center for the Arts
201 S Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, January 24th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Friday, March 14th
Teasers, tormentors and scrims are types of curtains used in the theater. They define the space of the stage, and they shape the illusions we see there. Like the theatrical curtains of this title, the curtains represented in these paintings play multiple roles. They act as a figure, a ground, a backdrop, a partition, a lush symbol of authority, a decoration, a convincing illusion, a dissolving ghost image, a remnant of the past, and a surface onto which we project our associations. Likewise, the paintings themselves shift perceptually between space and flat surface, appearing and disappearing, revealing and concealing.
These works take Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors as a model through which to explore the uncertain nature of perception and the visual rhetoric of representation. The Ambassadors is a double portrait of two men sent as diplomats by King Francis I of France to King Henry VIII of England, probably in the hope of convincing Henry not to divorce and leave the Roman Catholic Church. Holbein’s painting is a tour de force of Sixteenth Century Northern European realistic representation whose extraordinary attention to observable details suggests great faith in the truthfulness of sight, while the inclusion of a prominent and spatially ambiguous anamorphic image complicates the painting’s visual illusion and injects a note of doubt into this statement of faith.
Carrelli’s paintings here are part of a larger series titled Profane Mimesis. They mimic and reinterpret their source, employing a combination of selective imitation and alteration of Holbein’s painting to give form to the tensions between sight and vision: between what we see and what we believe it must mean. They are not religious paintings, and neither is Holbein’s. Indeed, the title Profane Mimesis might even suggest that the act of imitation is kind of desecration. However, these paintings do express a dialectic of faith and doubt in the power of images: a combination of love and mistrust of sight. Shown here, in what was once the sacristy of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, these paintings have the opportunity to echo and converse with this elegant and rhetorically seductive environment.
RSVP for the opening reception on Friday, January 24, from 6pm to 9pm
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Tags: Chicago, Epiphany Center for the Arts, near west side, Steven Carrelli, TEASER TORMENTOR AND SCRIM
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