Featuring Gaia Carboni, Patrick Jacobs, and Martin Roth.
Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BMV)
Avenida Paseo de la Reforma #255
Colonia Cuauhtémoc. Delegacion Cuauhtémoc. 06500 Mexico D.F.
April 16–May 4, 2012
Opening:
April 16 at 7 pm
Contacts:
viola [at] thepoolnewyorkcity.com
luigi@thepoolnewyorkcity.com
fcampuzano@bmv.com.mx
+52 (55) 5342 9061
+1 646 244 9783
THE POOL NYC is proud to present “Organic Intuitions,” a group show held at the BOLSA de VALORES, in Mexico City.
The show includes the work of three artists operating worldwide: Patrick Jacobs, an American artist based in New York, Gaia Carboni, an Italian artist based in Faenza, and Martin Roth, an Austrian artist who lives and works in NYC.
Jacobs, Carboni, and Roth work on the theme of Nature and its related aspects: this exhibition aims at showing various artistic interpretations and representations of Nature, by using different media and approaches.
Our view of nature, by nature, is always restrained, and any representation will always be a “constructed landscape.”
Entering into a gallery or a museum often turns out to be a very cold and aseptic experience. More often than not, the outside world is not allowed to cross the border of a gallery or a museum.
We intentionally overcome that boundary separating art and life, and we do that by surprising the viewer, welcoming nature into the gallery, and this time into the Mexican Stock Exchange.
The general idea is to present a space with works inspired by nature and focused on the nature itself.
Carboni’s works can be paired with Jacobs’s works for their concentration on the naturalistic aspect of the world and for their obsessive technique. Carboni is paying attention to the evolution of the object: it’s the chain of life, as a circle, and everything begins and ends in nature. Carboni represents nature in its constant metamorphosis revealing the profound interconnection within different worlds, either architectonic, organic or vegetal.
Through what appears to be a small window on the wall, Jacobs is taking the viewer to a new reduced world, made of natural components and bizarre details. Patrick Jacobs’s work blurs perceptual distinctions between painting, photography and constructed reality. Set behind lenses, these foreshortened spaces occupy the hidden architecture of the wall, offering the viewer an encompassing and magical view of the mundane—a backyard overgrown with dandelions, a kitchen linoleum floor pierced by the leg of a stool, a downspout clogged with dead leaves.
Roth is cultivating grass on a peculiar surface: a rug.
Martin Roth creates a situation—and that situation inevitably, in the words of the artist, “takes on a life on its own.” Sometimes this work can be uncanny because it defies expectations and the inanimate turns animate right before the viewer’s eyes—in a sense his art comes alive. In Martin’s constructed landscapes, animal and plant life takes center stage. By bringing nature into the gallery, Roth challenges the viewer to reevaluate our relationship with the natural world.
By bringing the lawn indoors he plays with the notion of how nature has already been domesticated. The grass will grow upwards towards the artificial sun for a few weeks, and then die as its roots fail to find essential nutrients in their soilless environs.
In the Islamic religion everything is symbolic of the wisdom of the creator. Islamic carpets often depict gardens; in Muslim belief, the woven wool representation is of the same symbolic order as an actual soil and leaf garden. All things here, be they natural phenomena, or representations, are expressions of spiritual wonders there. “Here in this carpet lies an ever-lovely spring.”
For these artists there are three different ways of representing nature: in Jacobs you can feel beauty and cruelty, in Roth you can see renovation, persistence, and hope, and in Carboni you will find all the shapes of the natural evolution.
