DOCUMENTS – abstraction, landscape, culture

Posted on: Friday, May 11th, 2012

We are pleased to announce and welcome artist Anthony Vega to LGTripp Gallery. Philadelphia-based, Vega is an outstanding, emerging artist with a clear and distinct vision, seriously committed to his art. DOCUMENTS, a collaborative effort with Luella Tripp, is Vega’s first solo exhibition at the gallery along with previously featured artists, Seonglan Kim Boyce and Paul Fabozzi.

DOCUMENTS — Anthony Vega, Paul Fabozzi, Seonglan Kim Boyce, May 4 – June 2, 2012

Posted on: Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

We are pleased to announce and welcome artist Anthony Vega to LGTripp Gallery. Philadelphia-based, Vega is an outstanding, emerging artist with a clear and distinct vision, seriously committed to his art. DOCUMENTS, a collaborative effort with Luella Tripp, is Vega’s first solo exhibition at the gallery along with previously featured artists, Seonglan Kim Boyce and Paul Fabozzi.

Questioning our surroundings and the seduction of our environment has been a catalyst for artists’ investigation for quite some time. DOCUMENTS explores this context by looking at the relationship abstraction has to our contemporary landscape in the work of artists Vega, Boyce and Fabozzi.

Abstraction lends itself as an interesting metaphor for our current visual landscape, from how we see the world to how we cope with our ever-shifting cultural landscape (issues of identity and politic). Abstraction demands a question, it begs to be interpreted, it is curious, namely, in that the representation is hidden, the intention is open or the investigation is alluring. Abstraction (in this context) is a plastic document.

In looking at the questions asked throughout the history of art, it is impossible to investigate any artwork outside of social context (culture) and history. It becomes interesting to revisit the influence many historically important artists have on art today and their relationship to this investigation of landscape. What connections can be made to the intentions and questions of Matisse, Cezanne and Seurat, among others, in the modernist landscape to these three artists in our contemporary landscape? Has the impetus for documenting changed, are the concerns of the past still pertinent, or has the scope and scale shifted? How can we place contemporary artists within this framework?

Anthony Vega explores abstraction through image, metaphor and color. The intention of the work is to challenge our relationship to expectation and narrative, socially through layering, color, pattern and image. This is from a similar position to Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso whose rich exploration of self, culture and inquiry led to a challenging of expectation and an invitation to question.

Paul Fabozzi also plays with nature, observation, and documentation. Fabozzi’s surfaces offer an exploration of contemporary place, time, and spatiality, both inside the mechanism of society and within the experience of the individual.

Seonglan Kim Boyce uses nature, observation and documentation as the catalyst for her work. The geometric forms, composition and color play on a contemporary visual investigation of self, nature and space. This is not unlike the intentions of Paul Cezanne or Georges Seurat whom obsessively investigated visual experience and the means for documenting within their culture.