René Francisco Rodríguez


Dear Friends and good women and men:
René Francisco Rodríguez will be representing Cuba at the Venice Biennial (June 10 – 21 November 2007). Raymundo Sesma will be showing a monumental site intervention in the crane of Bâlelatina, Basel (June 13 – 17, 2007). If you are going to be in Venice and/or Basel, I invite you to see both pieces by my artists.

I love you all and wish you all the BEST!!!

  • Nina Menocal

    • William Cordova


    William Cordova, Territorial Pissing, 2007, collage on gold leaf

    William Cordova’s first solo show in Switzerland “Pachacuti” (Stand up next to a Mountain)

  • Arndt Partner

    • FIGURES ON THE MOVE


    FIGURES ON THE MOVE

    They come from the imagination’s subconscious wonderland. They are laughing, jumping, dancing, jerking, twitching and moving around like hectic tap dancers. They are creatures of a kind, fetched from a cabinet of curiosities – and nonetheless they look sorely human, all too human. This is precisely why one feels a strange sense of familiarity when viewing the artist’s pictures. They are about you, me and our peculiar neighbor. And surely also about beings that you still can’t put a name to.

    We speak about the figures in the painter Heidi P’s universe. And what we are speaking about is a universe that is entirely her own. She started – seriously – painting about three or four years ago, quickly making contact with an art gallery that sold her pictures in short order. Ever since that time, things have been moving fast­ – well-deserved. She has – presumably without consciously wanting to – become a part of the wave that is currently raging in the art world, a wave that has to do with the potential of art to communicate in a direct and unpretentious way, without too many filters and theoretical explanations.

    But don’t make any mistake about it: Heidi P has a lot to offer – a fertile sense of fantasy, raving humor and a wryly capricious approach of the kind that can only emanate from a wholly uncontrolled poetic sensibility. Call it a seventh sense … or an eighth sense. In any event, it is quite certain that Heidi P possesses a delicate intuition about life’s tumults and more erratic aspects. Her talent is secure and it’s already clear to see that it will develop even further than what we’ve seen up until now.

    Her sources of inspiration feed in from everywhere: from her subconscious mind, of course, but also from the figures that she suddenly fastens her eye on, on a billboard, on a street corner or on an old wall. No matter what, as long as it ignites her picture-creating capabilities.

    And then there are the colors. To a great extent, Heidi P builds her pictures up in colors. Bright colors, which vividly and jovially resound in the paintings like some kind of music. And then again, she is most certainly not afraid of using the colors in an untraditional way.

    In certain periods in her output, she has been “writing” on the paintings. Short sentences – a kind of poetry. But her pictures tell stories in themselves, a profusion of short stories. Or, more precisely, fragments. For it is up to us to guess further, fueled by our own curiosity. There is no answer key.

  • Heidip

    • Jimmy Baker


    Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Jimmy Baker. Titled Rapture, the exhibition is a collection of fragmented narratives and artifacts that regard the present as if it were unearthed in a time capsule from our near future.

    Baker’s variety of working media presents the inevitable chaos of futuristic digital culture in form of highly refined aesthetics. Classical portraiture, iPods, photography, sculpture and hacked cell phones describe a variety of global concerns that accumulate into a grim dystopian future. The sum of this global turmoil is more the subject rather than its parts. While at once Baker’s future is looming and ominous, it also provides hope by voicing the conscientious and aware. Baker contemplates the structure of information, and how we perceive events in hopes that we will step outside our moment in history.

  • Robert & Sanstilton

    • OSCAR TUAZON


    OSCAR TUAZON / “I’D RATHER BE GONE” /

    STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present its first exhibition of objects and photographic works by Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon. “I’d Rather Be Gone” continues the artist’s yearlong examination on how personal liberty can be embodied in architecture. Drawing on the early building experiments of the hippy commune Drop City as well as current practices in ‘dwelling portably’, Tuazon’s work questions the conditions for sustainability and self-suffiency.

    “When I attended Deep Springs College in the mid-90s, the Greyhound would stop at an intersection in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the college. You had to wait there until someone drove out to get you, which sometimes took a few hours. The only other thing at that intersection was a whorehouse in a doublewide. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal.) On hot days, the Madame of the house would sometimes invite us inside and offer us a cold drink. The only way in and out of the college is through the whorehouse.” Tuazon’s works and writings continuously return to the ideal of the bare minimum – put forward by the writer Henry David Thoreau in the novel “Walden” (1854) – and thus also return to the question of whether isolation from civil society may gain a more objective understanding of it.

    Since graduating from Whitney ISP Tuazon has produced a series of sculptures composed of urban debris: cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, printing plates, OSB boards from building sites, or melanin boards from defunct kitchens – materials gathered from the area of his Paris studio or near the various venues of his exhibitions. In an initial phase these sculptural works would take forms of geodesic domes and draw on such typologies as indigenous building techniques, DIY architecture, as well as a more determined dedication to structural clarity, advocated by the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller. More recently the works have taken on the character of full-scale building prototypes, such as the work “1:1” at the center of the show.

    This assemblage of melanin boards and wooden pallets is constructed to serve as a corner of the house Tuazon planning to erect near Portland, Oregon. Approaching the building project through a series of trial products rather than drawings, the exhibition context becomes a chance to test rather than portray this situation. At the same time Tuazon exposes the shortcomings of the works as prototypes, which continuously seem to be balancing between actual functionality and a possible transcendent materiality as sculptures. Tuazon draws attention to the disjuncture of forcing one space (the un-built house) onto another space (the gallery), and underscores the impossibility of really modelling something accurately in the context of an exhibition. Adding to these sculptures are four folded and framed photographs, rendering tableaux of temporary architecture from the woods of Portland. The photographs become a surface for exploring another kind of space, while being folded also modulating the distances within the image, between one space and another.

    Oscar Tuazon (b. 1976 in Seattle, Washington) received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works were earlier this year shown in solo exhibitions at Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver and at castillo/corrales, Paris. His recent group exhibitions include “Down By Law”, The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; “The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)”, STANDARD (OSLO); and “Minotaur Blood” at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London. “Metronome no. 10”, which Tuazon co-edited with Clementine Deliss, will also be included in the Documenta 12 Magazines project.

    Upcoming projects:
    Matias Faldbakken: “A Hideous Disease / Art Basel 38 / Statements / 11.06.-17.06.2007
    Gardar Eide Einarsson: “South of Heaven” / Frankfurter Kunstverein / 27.07.-16.09.2007

  • Standard Oslo