Janaina Tschäpe — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 5, 2011 → January 21, 2012

Galerie Xippas announces its second solo exhibition by German-born, New Yorkbased, Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe.

Tschäpe’s explosive new series of drawings continues her ongoing investigation of gestural expression and its ability to describe metaphysically charged spaces that go above and beyond our material understanding of the natural world.

As always, her work functions at a variety of scales, expanding and contracting the viewer’s point of reference from micro, sub-atomic particles to the cosmic and metaphysical scale of the classic Romantic landscape. In many ways, these drawings are not only Impressionistic representations of natural landscapes, but due to their almost heroic scale and the wandering eye of the viewer, like Monet’s ‘Nymphéas’, they are landscapes in and of themselves. These are thick, enveloping formal gardens of entire ecosystems — where life blossoms and flourishes, only to decay and die (or perhaps breathe new life). There is an acute, iridescent use of light — articulated by an unconventional palette suggesting South American flora and fauna — compounded by the matt surfaces of dry media on paper, materials absorbing the viewer into the physical support as it pulls the viewer into its open-ended narrative. Time eerily stands still, even as we contemplate forms which seem to grow and catch us in its thickets. The effect is simultaneously light due to its soft and comforting mammalian nature, and almost threatening in its ability to remind us that nature can overwhelm the physical body.

Tschäpe is describing the world in her own language, one we only have a vague understanding of, and will only understand in time, if ever — she takes us to a place where appreciation supersedes understanding. This primordial soup of the pre-conscious is articulated in gestural expression, and its subsequent narrative of the libidinal can be historically located at a time when Surrealism crossed the Atlantic, only to be reborn as Abstract Expressionism — pinpointing a space where the primal sub-conscious is sublimated into physical form.