Surrealism Today

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Art Exhibition

Philippe Charles Jacquet: Les Reclus (27 April–19 May, 2019)

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Will you be in New York City in April? Then you can’t miss Philippe Charles Jacquet’s surrealistic landscapes.

Philippe Charles Jacquet is an architectural painter: his haunting surrealistic landscapes are an exercise in precision, layered variety, and esoterism

Opening Reception on 27 April, 2019, 6-8pm
RSVP Required: info@hugogalerie.com

Les Reclus is a solo exhibition featuring the carefully articulated dreamscapes of Philippe Charles Jacquet to be exhibited at the Hugo Galerie in New York City. The show introduces new pieces by the artist in his celebrated style in which he builds his watery worlds with various and highly planned painting techniques.

Les Reclus’ title is more relevant to his canvas’ structural capacity than their figural; while most canvases contain more than one figure, rarely does a canvas contain more than one structure. The reclusivity of Jacquet’s built environments, dramatically poised within surreal and stretching landscapes, lends his paintings an enigmatic quality. Adding to their mystery is the fact that they cannot be quickly dismissed as make-believe—they are too realistic, too aligned with our own experiences of stone houses, wooden rowboats, reflection pools, receding tides, and cloud-filled horizons. Even the slope of a figure’s slouching shoulders is too… personal.

Jacquet is an architectural painter; he plans his landscapes and their built environments with measured precision, constructing them in a layered variety of media and methods until they are as real as they are imagined. The materiality finessed, from mirror-like water to rust-scored wood grain, brings his painted compositions to life. The combination of textures, geometric accuracy, and concise colors creates an esotericism that includes viewers rather than excludes them; Jacquet’s solitary structures do not reject but envelop the viewer with the familiarity of a feeling. As if we’ve been here before. Perhaps in a dream.

Hugo Galerie is a fine art gallery in New York City specializing in contemporary figurative painting and sculpture. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working in a variety of media and range of genres.

Le Reclus, oil on board, 311⁄2″ x 311⁄2″ (80 x 80cm)
Le Port d’Attache, oil on board, 283⁄4” x 351⁄2” (73 x 90.2cm)
Une Soirée Ordinaire, oil on board, 471⁄4″ x 471⁄4″ (120 x 120cm)

See Jacquet’s previous feature in Surrealism Today from 2015.

“Memento Mori” Exhibition

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Memento mori (Latin: “remember death”) is the theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

The group exhibit at Star Gallery NYC will showcase the work of dozens of prominent artists’ personal explorations of this theme. Award-winning artists include Marshall Arisman, Chris Buzelli, Leslie Cober-Gentry, Katherine Streeter, Jason Limon, Gary Taxali, Anthony Freda, Victor Stabin, Steven Tabbutt, Skull-A-Day founder, Noah Scalin, Kevin Champeny, Zoltron, Dan Zollinger, Billy The Artist, Craig LaRotonda, James Hoston, James Yang, Peter Devito, Caitlin McCormack, Santiago Caruso, Rhett Hutchence, Gary Kroman, Eric Probst, Kevin Pyle, Danielle Mercado and Estephany Lopez.

Star Gallery NYC

Star Gallery NYC will also present a painting by the legendary Marshall Arisman. Arisman’s paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Museum of American Art. Arisman’s show Sacred Monkeys was the first American exhibit to be shown in Mainland China.

Skull-laden imagery looms large throughout art history, from the Aztecs to Damien Hirst. This show will present a unique and exciting collection. Much of the art in the group show at Star Gallery NYC is the stuff of dreams and macabre fantasies, but this theme also rings true as an affirmation of life rather than a celebration of death. There is dark humor, elegant craftsmanship, and masterful skills all at play in this eclectic exhibition.

Star Gallery NYC’s exhibition includes the most interesting artists who are delving into this iconography, and the gallery is exhibiting the selected works together in one gallery space for a limited time next month.

Star Gallery NYC specializes in showing the best of pop-surrealism and cutting-edge illustration. Death is the great unifier and its most potent symbol, the skull, is a reminder that humanity is alike under the skin — it is one. The work in this show is spiritual and timeless, and it is an exhibition of which Star Gallery NYC is particularly proud.

The show will include original paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures created by a global selection of artists. The artworks are all for sale and Star Gallery NYC offers works suited for a range of collectors. Curated by Anthony and Amber Freda.

A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit Haitian orphans.

The exhibition will be on view Jan. 16 through Jan. 20. The opening reception is on Saturday, Jan. 19, 2019, at 2 Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The event is free and open to the general public.

About Star Gallery NYC

Star Gallery NYC is an art gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The gallery frequently exhibits art that falls into the categories of Pop-Surrealism, Lowbrow, Comix, and contemporary illustration.
Learn more at stargallerynyc.com.

Carl Jennings and Tammy Eilyn Jennings

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You are invited to an exhibition of new work by Carl and Tammy Eilyn Jennings at the forthcoming Aloha Ho’omaluhia XXXIII exhibition, May 1st – 29th at Ho’omaluhaia Gardens in Kaneohe. The show will feature new digital collages by Tammy as well as two new figurative paintings by Carl. The work deals with overlapping interests that focus on immigration, the environment and the need for hope and change.

Carl Jennings

Tammy Eilyn Jennings
New Work: Carl Jennings & Tammy Eilyn Jennings
Ho’omaluhai Botanical Gardens, Kāne’ohe, Hawai’i
May 1st – 28th, 2017
Opening reception, Sunday April 30th, 4-6pm.

Surrealism: the conjured life at the MCA of Chicago

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Surrealism: the conjured life at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago is an exhibition running from Nov 21, 2015–Jun 5, 2016. The exhibition includes surrealist who participated in Breton’s original surrealist movement, as well as its influence in successive generations of artists (especially Chicago based artists.) These artists include Imagist Ed Paschke, Gertrude Abercrombie, H.C. Westermann, and Gladys Nilsson.

Surrealism: The Conjured Life presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate the deep currents that Surrealism sent through the international art world—and especially through Chicago—since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. A global movement that encompassed a wide number of art forms, including film, theater, poetry, and literature, Surrealism came of age with poet André Breton’s formal declaration in 1924. This deeply emotional and psychological art form flourished in the 1930s and 1940s—turbulent times of economic instability, rapidly changing social mores, and war.

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The exhibition is built on a spiral inner wall of influential surrealists and expands outward to the artists they influenced, including Chicago artists from the so-called “Monster Roster” of the 1950s and ’60s as well as the Chicago Imagists.

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Surrealism found fertile ground in Chicago, I think in part because the art history of this town was always looking at the figure and representational imagery. There were some abstract artists here of course, but the overriding style was representational, and surrealism is a representational art form which followed on the heels of a very abstract time for art in Europe. I think that was one of the reasons there was this convergence between what the surrealists were doing in Europe and then the sort of tastes or interests of the Chicago collectors and Chicago audiences.

Via MCA.org

 

 

Surrealist art brings dreams and reality closer together–sometimes uncomfortably so. The movement started in Paris in the 1920s and influenced generations of Chicago and other American artists. Its echoes are heard loud and clear today.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago dug deep into its holdings and brought forth a trove of surrealist art that is both foreign and familiar in the exhibition “Surrealism: The Conjured Life.”

More Here

Philippe Charles Jacquet “Les Gens Du Canal” Opening 9/24/2015 in NYC

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This exhibition occurred in September 2015

AXELLE FINE ARTS GALERIE SOHO is proud to present LES GENS DU CANAL, a new collection of work by French painter Philippe Charles Jacquet. The artist has worked with the gallery since 2008 and has had seven extremely successful solo exhibitions in that time. Trained as an architect, Jacquet paints mysterious twilight worlds with incredible precision and detail. Inspired by the coasts, estuaries and architecture of the Rance Valley in Brittany, France, his oil on board works are stunning composites of the real and the imagined.

Jacquet’s signature simple stone houses seem to rise organically from the earth and sit among vast seas, skies and rolling fields. The artist often includes a single, small person, emphasizing the greatness of the surrounding natural world. Jacquet’s houses often have a single golden light shining from a window – similarly to the inclusion of a solitary person, this light can be interpreted as a symbol of hope or one of loneliness. It is up to the viewer to decide. At once, Jacquet depicts the world as one of natural beauty and wonder and as one of profound emptiness.

His serene greens and blues lend a dreamlike feeling to his surreal compositions. His pieces play with the viewer’s perception – it is often unclear whether the artist has depicted water or grass, a floating boat or a resting one – in this way, his works are enigmatic other worlds, reminiscent of reality but wholly peculiar and unearthly at the same time.

Born in Paris in 1957, Jacquet studied architecture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. In 2000, after 20 years in the field, he stopped and dedicated himself solely to painting. In fact, he never studied painting and his technique is entirely self-taught. Jacquet currently lives and works in Pantin, a suburb of Paris. He will attend the opening reception on September 24, 2015.

Hugo Fine Arts Galerie
472 West Broadway, NY 10012
212.226.2262
www.hugogalerie.com