Gallery A: Cheyney Thompson

Press Release

Opening Friday  11 April  from 19,00 to 21,30 – From 11 April to 30 May 2008

Painterly skill, the technical reproduction of images and considerations of the photographic are often present in the thought of the artist. In his consideration of the monochrome for this exhibition, Cheyney Thompson’s latest works (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1975), conceive of the painterly sign as on riven with internal difference.  Using silkscreen on canvas the artist has placed photograhicly enlarged images of a halftone filter, itself the very ground of certain types of image reproduction into a barely visible set of compositional strategies. By cutting and rotating the angle of the halftone screen the surface attempts to articulate itself  as both subject and object of the painting.

Carrying this logic of variability further, the traces of compositionality are called into question by the occasional  interventions on the otherwise pristine monochromes. Sometimes asking friends to alter the work, in this case, the artist has transfered a section of frame from Ulrik Hetlofts’s video. Thus the conception of the Monochrome as painting’s dissolution into a larger structural totality is replayed with an insistence placed on inconsistancy and contradiction.

The investigation of  the technical procedures of image reproduction is continued in the the series of drawings  entitled “Sets of Curves from Bellona  to Rubens to Cezanne to Bezier . deuxieme partie.”  Initially taking a cue from  the specificly photographic metaphor that allowed to Cezanne to reconcieve  pictorial space. This series of work attempts to give form to the transformation of  modes of reproduction implicated by Bezier’s curve. This highly compact mathematical curve is used in many types of  production and reproduction since its discovery in the late 1950s . From typography to car design the Bezier curve helped usher in the age of Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacture. In this ongoing work a series of studies executed by Cezanne after Rubens’s Bellona in the painting “The Apotheosis of Henry IV and the proclamation of Queen Maria De Medici” were first rendered as Bezier curves which allowed the computed to guess at a morphologically similar drawing which would consist of elements from two model drawings. From this first generation of interpretations a new set has been produced for this exhibition. The drawings were produced  using a robotic arm which were then used to make silkscreens which were applied directly on the gallery wall.

The focus of the artist then determines how the image can be an analysis of the processes that, through mechanical means, reveal the transmission of the image, even if the ones that the artist proposes, transformed and filtered by repeated interventions, seem to have nothing in common with the initial representations. It is precisely in this investigation that Cheyney Thompson’s skill lies, and he shows us how the grid of tangents forming the image and the reality of things can be read through their most secret weaves.