The Sunday Painter is pleased to announce the opening of Whistle and Flute, a solo presentation of new works by New York based artist James Viscardi.
The slippery nature of human things.
Layers, associations, appropriations, concept’s and design all distilled into physical objects, objects tugged back and fourth across boundaries of applied exclusivity, to a point of flux.
Too much friction, too fast, the disjointed hypocrisy bubble to the surface, a new declaration must be made, compromises must be had. The old order must be reshuffled, redesigned, its very nature must be reassessed, an entropic universe dictates the only constant to be change.
“Dorotea may have tried to out-minimalize her this morning. Dorotea’s black dress for all its apparent simplicity is still trying to say several things at once. Probably in at least three languages. Cayce has hung her Buzz Rickson’s over the back of her chair and now she catches Dorotea looking at it. The Rickson’s is a fanatical museum grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket, as purely functional and iconic a garment as the previous century produced. Dorotea’s slow burn is being accelerated, Cayce suspects, by her perception that Cayce’s MA-1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson’s having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion. Cayce knows for instance that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally the result of sewing with pre war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. The makers of the Rickson’s have exaggerated this but only very slightly and done a hundred other things as well so that their product has become in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. it is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates. It is easily the most expensive garment Cayce owns and would be virtually impossible to replace…. “You don’t mind,” says Stone Street producing a pack of cigarettes, called Silk Cut, which Cayce, never a smoker thinks of somehow being the British equivalent of the Japanese Mild Sevens, two default brands of creatives”…
– Pattern recognition by William Gibson
Loose versions of the artist’s clothing, hand-stitched, enlarged and hung over stretcher frames, a new body of paintings.
Considering the works as a “kind of fucked up hyper-impressionism”, they are the most natural step for Viscardi, liberated from the historic and cultural weight synonymous with a conventional painting format.
It’s a body of work that is imbued with many of paintings sensibilities, amateur tailoring and the nature of the sewing machine makes for work that is as unruly and unpredictable as a painting, with the subsequent loose thread becoming akin to the rogue brush mark.The paintings are duplicitous in their ability to function in the manner of both clothing, a projection of personality, and as figurative painting/illusional representation.
In a time when every aspect of the artist can be fetishized in an insatiable and reductive process motivated by a desire for authenticity, artists personal lives are often outed, involved and exaggerated, bleeding into the context and altering the perception of works, in this semi auto-biographic body Viscardi is both humouring and critiquing this practice.
