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Many moons ago, actually in 2005 (although it seems forever) yours truly had his first, and thankfully last solo show of his career. I quickly realized that I was a way better collector than painter, although I still have the urge to return to it every now and then...

Well, a few shows after mine, Dana Frankfort had a show at the gallery. I went to see it, as it also used text, and was really blown away. She uses text as the starting point for what ends up being a combination of tagging/graffiti and abstract expressionist painting. The simplicity in a way is muted by its raw energy and the use of color, its layers and the depth, overpainting over and over again, is really stunning. She also dabbles in floral paintings, which I think are less interesting, although her use of color is still quite strong. 

I am not sure why I haven't seen her show more in the past few years, but I am officially loving it and encouraging new eyes on a great body of work.  I find myself comparing her to Ruscha, Bochner, or even Schnabel (this may be a stretch, but I think she has it in her to keep pushing ahead) I do believe that she is an artist that will get her due attention again very soon and believe she will be on everyones tongues sooner than later. Artists that explode onto the scene and then disappear are a dime a dozen, but I think the painting world is missing someone who is doing exactly what she is doing. 

I pulled some nice text from Saatchi Online, which summarizes the work well.

Dana Frankfort currently shows with Inman Gallery in Houston.

"Merging graffiti and high art abstraction Dana Frankfort’s paintings occupy a hazy space between verbal and visual communication. Using text as a platform for expressive embellishment each canvas reveals a word or phrase within its sumptuous surface; simple statements such as ‘Believe’, ‘Beyond’, or ‘Paint’ become esoteric starting points for the physical negotiation of painting. Adapting text as the subject for her paintings, Frankfort distils both the poetic and formal qualities of the written word. Repeatedly scrawled, painted over, scribbled out, and intensified, each slogan becomes abstracted as a series of intersecting lines, curves and angles, their meanings amplified and distorted through the gesture and surface quality of their manifestation. Simultaneously brutal and ethereal, Frankfort’s canvases draw from the lineage of Howard Hodgkin and Morris Louis in their intensity of colour, impassioned brushstrokes, and linear compositions. The sophistication of Frankfort’s process belies the imperative of her sentiments. The urgency of her aesthetic is contrasted with time consuming processes of sanded surfaces, premeditated spill patterns, and calculated layers of matte and high-gloss finish. Through this considered arbitration, Frankfort frames her text with the complexity of psychological depth, creating a palimpsest of memory and emotive association."

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Amy Bessone at Veneklasen Werner Berlin

I have not been all too fond of works of hers that I had seen prior but these are really great.

http://www.vwberlin.com/exhibitions/Amy%20Bessone:%20Hit%20Your%20Head!/press

Chadwick Rantanen at Standard Oslo

I think this work is really interesting; honestly, I do not understand it very well but it is a very interesting spacial work and a very new way of presenting information on long poles. 

http://www.standardoslo.no/en/exhibitions/more_often_and_in_more_places

Requiem for the Sun at Blum and Poe

This show is simply gorgeous and important. The space is perfectly suited for a show like this and I have gone back often to view it.

http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/requiem-sun-art-mono-ha#images

Heart to Hand at Swiss Institute

Really nice group show including three artists I collect.

http://swissinstitute.net/exhibitions/

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Last winter, 2011, I traveled to Vienna and saw Melancholy and Provocation at the Leopold Museum. It was an ode to Egon Schiele, my favorite, and the curator asked six contemporary artists to participate in the show, to show their reaction, ode, and interpretation of the work alongside a nice amount of Schiele's masterpieces. Egon Schiele makes my blood burn, my heart pound, my skin tingle, my toes curl, and my mind fall into what I can only describe is my most intimate and pure nature. 

I find it more and more feasible that my true nature or being, personality and traits, are strongly related to some kind of inherent gene that has been carried over from my forefathers and from a society where I was born. Being jewish, I obviously have a hard time relating to the actions of my nations past, but I am not referring to that. I am trying to put my finger on a born melancholic nature and why it exists within me. Is it genetical, is it just a trait that is very common simply in my family or does it reach to former yugoslavia, austria, germany, poland, czech republic, and even hungary and some nordic countries. 

I am most likely opening a huge can of worms here, but I don't mean to state anything more than a question: I am a very happy person.  am healthy and fairly successful, but why was I, as far as i remember, always drawn to the dark, the sad, the lonely, and the melancholy? Why do I instinctually relate and feel comfort when I look at art from those regions, especially Austria, Germany, and other eastern european artists? Is it just me, or is there a certain inherent seed within me that makes me relate to such things, by artists that I seem to understand better than those from elsewhere, or is it simply coincidence that I tend to like that kind of work more than other work? Is it the aggression, the sadness, the mood...or is it something completely different and all chance? 

Maybe I just like expressionism, ab-ex or whatever you want to title it; I think  relate to a certain psyche.

I may be rambling here, but it really struck me when reading the title to the show: MELANCHOLY & PROVOCATION. I looked at my girlfriend and said, LOOK! finally, I have found a title to what I have been describing. So...as I have been growing my personal collection but also trying to in a way curate a show of my dream collection in my mind, I decided to give you examples of the works that make me feel these emotions so clearly that it feels, to a certain extent, second nature. I am drawn to these works, and am surprisingly comforted by them. 

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 I am not going to pretend to be able to speak about the work better than the press release the gallery released, but I will say that I was truly touched by the mastery, beauty, humor, and sheer brilliance of the work of Pietro Roccasalva. In his first US exhibition, he blew my socks off; the work is simply the result of a man who takes his rare gift and applies it to painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation with such detail, thought, and imagination that it really leaves you thinking that this is as close to master painting that I have seen. The details, the colors, the subjects, the sheer brilliance of the surfaces...really stunning and special. 

"David Kordansky Gallery is very pleased to announce The Strange Young Neighbours, a solo exhibition by Pietro Roccasalva. The show is Roccasalva's first with the gallery, as well as his first solo gallery exhibition in the United States. It will include paintings, drawings, a neon work, and a large-scale sculptural installation that will serve as the site for a tableau vivant performance. The performance will take place on Saturday, February 11th, beginning at 11:00am and continuing until the end of the opening reception at 9:00pm. 

Roccasalva explores the potential for art objects to become active agents of simulacrum, sites where the animate and inanimate worlds undergo profound crossing. Painting serves as the orbital center for a practice that includes sculpture, performance, and video, and that has increasingly come to represent a self-contained universe of poetic narratives and philosophical inquiries. Roccasalva has referred to his paintings as 'microchips', devices that organize an ever-expanding network of processes and allusions. Synthesizing compositional strategies drawn from religious iconography, modernist collage, and digital distortion, and skillfully rendered over months and even years, the figures in the paintings are both deeply familiar and impossibly strange. They freeze the gaze and conjure the sense that though artworks can never be fully understood, they are caught with their viewers in an endless feedback loop of exchanged signification. 

The Strange Young Neighbours borrows its title from a standalone tale in Goethe's 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the story, a near-catastrophic drowning plays a key role in uniting a young couple destined to be together since childhood. Though the onset of adulthood and its misunderstood passions temporarily drive them apart, when the girl jumps from a moving boat and the boy saves her, they finally realize that they are in fact meant to be married. 

This tale is just one of the texts that inform Just Married Machine, a major sculptural installation that occupies the center of the gallery and sets the stage for a series of new paintings as well as the tableau vivant. A wooden boat suggests direct connection to Goethe's narrative, but the other objects suggest that additional processes are at play. In fact, the scene is also based on a still/still life taken from the short Pasolini film La Ricotta. Roccasalva has allowed a series of visual slippages to transform objects depicted in what is essentially a traditional nature morte into fully realized, life-sized objects: a shallow tray becomes the mandolin-shaped boat, an overturned basket becomes the hot air balloon, and heads of garlic are translated, via a humorous visual 'misunderstanding', into a sculpture that resembles a crown of toilets. The work's most profound slippage, however, takes place between genres as the nature morte is repositioned within the realm of living things. For instance, a bottle in the La Ricotta still life is reinterpreted as a woman; accordingly, on the day of the opening, an actual married couple will inhabit Just Married Machine. 

The performance and sculptures trace an arc that encompasses Pasolini, Goethe, and the concept of the 'bachelor machine.' However, where the 'bachelor machine' maintains desire by prolonging a state prior to consummation, Just Married Machine completes a circuit by unifying nature morte and living couple in a single visual experience. This process is further borne out by Roccasalva's practice, in which tableaux vivants often become the subjects of future drawings and paintings. Meanwhile, an accompanying still life painting entitled Study for Just Married Machine points to this process by enacting its reversal. The work depicts a goblet and a traditional Italian rosetta bread, seemingly gendered objects that will memorialize the departed actors when the tableau vivant is over. Here, Roccasalva continues to elaborate upon polarities of male and female and the fusion of animate and inanimate forms. 

Surrounding Just Married Machine are a group of paintings featuring a Il Traviatore, a recurring character in Roccasalva's work. This figure, in the form of a waiter, is always depicted carrying a lemon juicer on an otherwise empty tray. In the context of this exhibition, he is also the figure that bears witness to the elaborate coupling of genres that takes place before him. But because Roccasalva distorts, blurs, and deconstructs his face and body, the waiter's surreal fragmentation embodies that coupling: he is both a witness and a thing to be witnessed. His metallic tray and lid often become the subjects of extreme focus, tours de force of reflection and revelation in which an elaborate architecture, otherwise absent from the picture, can be viewed. 

Given that Roccasalva is constantly drawing on one aspect of his practice to inform another, the reflected architecture is perhaps best understood in relation to the lemon juicer. A foundational image in the artist's practice, the juicer has previously been seen as the imagined cupola of a cathedral in drawings, videos, and digital prints. It has been described by Roccasalva as the metonymic symbol of a potentially unachievable work: the construction, in some distant future, of the cathedral itself as a culminating artistic statement. If it this cathedral that appears in the waiter's tray, then he, like the lemon squeezer, is the bearer only of implied––rather than tangible––presence.

By their very nature, artworks exemplify openness of meaning. The intimate embrace between artwork and viewer can never be fully consummated. Nevertheless, a neon text from Lacan that marks the entrance/exit of the exhibition suggests that object and viewer share a common genetic source: the gaze. The words "you never look at me from the place I see you" are arranged as a linguistic Möbius strip; they carry the intimation that objects, once they have been looked upon with enough intensity, possess the haunting potential to stare back at their viewers. Like the waiter and his reflective tray, the viewer of The Strange Young Neighbours is implicated as another of its uncanny projections, an object that painting sees. 

In recent years, Pietro Roccasalva's work has been seen in major exhibitions internationally, including Fare Mondi / Making Worlds, 53rd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale; Manifesta 7, European Biennial for Contemporary Art, Trentino - Südtirol/Alto Adige, Italy; ITALICS. ARTE ITALIANA FRA TRADIZIONE E RIVOLUZIONE 1968-2008, Palazzo Grassi, Venice and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; and Tableaux, MAGASIN - Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France, and Z, CCS Bard at Seventh Regiment Armory, New York. Roccasalva lives and works in Milan."

See more information and images at KORDANSKY GALLERY

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