MAGMA gallery is glad to present the show “Organised Chaos”, with Andrew Schoultz (1975 - Wisconsin, USA), Kathryn MacNaughton (1985, Toronto, Canada), Alberonero (Luca Boffi – Lodi, 1991), from September 14 to November 9, 2019.
For the first time the works by Schoultz and MacNaughton will be exhibited in Italy together with the Italian talent Alberonero, already featured in other exhibitions at MAGMA gallery. All the works, created specifically for the exhibition, show from the very first glance a common dynamic approach to painting, thanks to the research carried out by the artists on the study of light, color and movement, which declines the complex and intuitive control, according to personal nuances and narratives.
Andrew Schoultz is a reference point for the Urban Art in U.S.A, with important and numerous exhibitions in his career, both in private galleries and in public institutions. In fact, the participation in the fundamental and recent group show "Beyond the Streets" in Los Angeles, a great anthology of Street Art, is accompanied by solo shows in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Rotterdam and many other cities. The value of his research is then emphasized by institutional group shows, among which those held at the Andy Warhol Museum (USA), Torrance Art Museum (USA), Havana Biennial (Cuba), Hyde Park Arts Center (USA), Laguna Art Museum (USA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA). His works are part of important public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Progressive Art Collection and Colección SOLO.
The chaos of Schoultz, represented in his previous works as scenes of battles, of fighting the capitalist system, is initially inspired by underground comics, graffiti, German cartography: the obsession of power and accumulation are recurring themes and powerfully depicted in his works.
In a new phase, to which even the works exhibited in "Organized Chaos" belong, his style turns, evolves, focusing on perception, on movement, enhancing that interest for the chromatic vibrations and the spatial breakthrough that accompany him even in his such recognized and appreciated murals. The violence represented before is replaced by the strength of the chromatic texture which, even without representing battle scenes, manages to make the spectator perceive an equally intense compositional and emotional tension.
Thus works such as "Electric Void" are created, where the title is enough to describe its quality: the painting seems to be just a detail of an explosive and hypnotic dynamic force, on which our gaze appears. When, for example, in the case of "Vessel with Arch", Schoultz portrays a common element like a vase, he does it almost by breaking it down into its structure and color and expanding its energy, leaving it to merge with the environment thanks to the incredible circular strokes , which also transform a still life into a continuous symphony of colors and movement.
Kathryn MacNaughton is one of the most promising names on the current contemporary scene. She arrives at "Organized Chaos" exhibition after finishing her successful residency at the PADA studios in Lisbon, a Portuguese cultural institution that selects every year six artists worldwide. The six works exhibited at MAGMA gallery are also created thanks to this experience, in particular "Onda" and "Flor". In these two works in fact Kathryn faces three-dimensionality for the first time, reaching an unprecedented poetic level but still maintaining the energy and instinctiveness of her pictorial features, which we find perfectly represented in the other canvases, including "Ventilar" and "Torcido ". Protagonist of numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, including at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto in 2016, and abroad, Kathryn saw her works published in important magazines such as Elle Magazine, District¬W Magazine, The Coveteur and Juxtapoz Magazine. On our Facebook profile you will find her recent interview with Forbes.
The quality of the works exhibited at MAGMA gallery allows us to immediately perceive the contrast between a pictorial brutality and a compositional rigor that has made Kathryn's style so appreciated and recognizable. An abstract painting that contrasts the two-dimensionality of flat backgrounds, with the force of curvilinear shapes that deconstruct the composition, like instinctive gashes. The meticulous process of overlapping layers creates works that are at once flat and sculptural, vital and suspended in time.
The third protagonist of “Organised Chaos” is Alberonero, emerging talent already capable of achieving important results. MAGMA gallery dedicated a solo show to him in 2018, and in the same year he took part in the important collective exhibition "Abstracta" at the Museo Gagliardi in Noto, with works by great Italian masters such as Turcato, Perilli, Tancredi and the young generation of Italian urban artists, like Tellas, 2501 and others. In 2017 he carried out a major installation project in Favara, Sicily, for Farm Cultural Park. Important, among others, is the participation in "Roma Arte Aperta", a collective show at the Ex Dogana in Rome, with works also by art masters such as Alighiero Boetti, Sol LeWitt, Jannis Kounellis and others.
For this new exhibition, Alberonero has created three sculptures that fit perfectly into the dialogue with the other two artists. These works testify the steps of a stylistic journey that started from visual perception, residual images and the interaction of these elements towards the viewer. In "Organized Chaos", however, materiality becomes the new fulcrum of his story. Natural elements such as small collected branches are compared with steel and cement, and the spatial yield in other works is dilated or exalted deceptively by mirrors. The use of colored pastes, deliberately applied in an instinctive, brutal manner, express the emotional, unstructured, free side of his research. These materials, belonging to our everyday life and therefore usually ignored, are mixed, opposed to a poetic level perhaps unprecedented for the artist himself, stripping away the two-dimensional rigor of the pictorial works and appropriating the physical space.
