Luce Gallery  presents Agency & Regulation, an exhibition of paintings, collages and sculpture by Derek Fordjour, opening October 7th, 2016.Agency & Regulation is an exploration of the tension that arises from the intersection of two potentially oppositional forces: agency; the capacity to move independently while exerting direct control over one’s own behavior, and regulation; an authoritative rule or system of rules dealing with restricting details or procedure.Theories of agency and regulation both separately emerge primarily from the field of economics. While Regulation Theory hinges on formulations of self-regulation,  Agency Theory is chiefly concerned with conflicts of interest between people with different interests in the same asset. Fordjour’s interests lie within the sociological motivations embedded within these theoretical assumptions. For the individual, questions of free will, personal freedom and the successive interaction with institutional structures, entrenched social hierarchies and authoritarian bodies establish the basis of his inquiry.The gamifcation of social structures and the inherent vulnerability of the individual situated within a contest are recurring themes within Fordjour’s work. The origins of these concepts are an outgrowth of the artist’s own bodily experience of motility while pondering recent social unrest. The allegorical relationship between art and sports provides philosophical context for his musings. Through the use of game and sporting imagery, lotteries, backroom meetings, game piece inspired sculptural objects, Fordjour implores a haptic exploration of personal, artistic and cultural concerns through various media.For the artist, his work is “fundamentally concerned with an exploration of vulnerability. As both an artist and marginalized person in society, I am keenly aware of my sense of agency. Much akin to the plight of a player situated within an individual or collective game, knowledge of the rules, the acquisition and development of skill and an adept application of both are critical to one’s survival."Working primarily in three media: sculpture, painting and collage, Agency & Regulation is also a material exploration. The sculptural works that appear in the show are constructed using bituminous coal crushed by the artist’s hand. Fordjour has spent the past several years working with coal, due in large part to emblematic associations of labor, extraction and value. Now, Fordjour presents his most ambitious coal sculptures to date. Collage works are the result of meticulous accumulation of numerous layers of newspaper, and a marriage of printmaking and painting processes resulting in highly textured one of a kind surface. What remains is evidence of both constructive and destructive acts reminiscent of the architectural interiors of Fordjour’s youth in Memphis, marked with the experience of inhabiting second-hand schools and churches in the aftermath of white flight.Paintings in the exhibition implore the use of spatial flattening reminiscent of modernist figuration to explore themes of agency and regulation. Equally concerned with such notions are sculptures such as Topdog, a playfully inverted totemic stack of coal covered busts assembled in a precarious vertical configuration. Topdog exemplifies the balance of play,uncertainty and possibility that underscore this significant body of work.Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee to parents of Ghanaian heritage. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia, earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work has appeared in group shows at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles, Sotheby's S2 Gallery in New York. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and Brooklyn Rail. His work appears in several collections throughout the US and Europe. He is the 2016-2017 Artist-in-Residence at Sugar Hill Museum in New York City.

"I've seen Avocado trees weighed down with so many fruit that some ripen right on the ground.   The whole tree is pulled taut by its harvest and when it rains branches break.  It's not stressful, it feels full and healthy and right.  I've seen whole banana trees fold in half under the weight of their own crop. The heart of a banana tree is like a bunch of paper straws filled with liquid and it kinks and bends easily unless you prop it up with something.  It doesn't matter what it is. People make supports out of scraps of 2x4, broom sticks or old folding chairs. Inevitably, the thing that is used to prop up the tree, begins to feel alive.  After the hummingbirds have come and the bananas have ripened and gone, people regularly leave the prop against the tree.  It acknowledges both an expired event and an inevitable future. Often, so much depends on so little".

Alex Chitty, born in 1979 in Miami, is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago.

In Slight Pitch, Chitty's work relies on specific points of tension. Entire surfaces are held in place by those points.  It's simple to imagine a piece dissolving right there in front of you.  You can basically take apart the whole thing in your head.  Once you trace out the steps and resolve the completed picture in your mind, the softest shift could cause the whole thing to slip apart.

While her portfolio ranges from photographic prints to sculpture, her current practice invites viewers to question both the materiality and presentation of an object. Chitty received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Smith College (MA) and a Master in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is a professor in the Sculpture and Printmedia departments. This year she had a solo shows at Patron Gallery and at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. In 2015 she exposed at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago.

In Stations Young continues his investigation into a series of diagrammatic marks originally abstracted from two sources; his fathers theological notations and explanations of the sign in Ferdinand de Sasussure’s semiotic theory. The potential that the forms could have meaning rests in the aesthetic of the diagram as an authoritative mark.  Operating as frame-works for latent ideas, the works invite the viewer to project meaning onto them but rather than provide the significance the work leaves to viewer to question why it is that implication may have been possible in the first place.  In this way the works operate as empty containers or possibilities as opposed to articulations filled with dogma or truth.
In this installation Young uses the 14 stations of the cross as a starting point to push the work further toward its religious reference while at the same time disrupting the ability to land on a particular doctrine. The stations serve not as an animation of the original story line, the trail and death of Christ, but as a method to move the audience through space.  Although no actual narrative occurs, the serial nature and linear structure produces an implication of logic suggesting an ideology that remains hidden.

Nate Young, born in 1981, lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.
Selected solo shows: The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; But not yet: in the spirit of linguistics, Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; Rehearsals, Bethel University, Arden Hills, MN; Tony Lewis and Nate Young, Room East, New York, NY; Joy, The Suburban, Oak Park, IL.
Selected group shows: Retreat (curated by Theaster Gates), Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL; Jerome Fellows Exhibition, Mpls. College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN; Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Go Tell it on the Mountain, California African Am Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Body Word and Image, Drake University, Des Moines, IA; Anthology (Participant), PS1 MOMA, New York, NY.

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We are pleased to announce American artist Joshua Nathanson's first European solo exhibition. Froth, the title of the show, references Henri Bergson's essay Laughter, in which the acrid foam of an ocean wave is used as a metaphor to describe the fundamental quality of humor. In this body of work Nathanson revisits the theme of seaside recreation on the California coast but within a new framework – here we witness the fever dream of one of his characters as he lies on the beach in the hot shade. Nocturnal absurdity eclipses diurnal banality and a surrealist fantasy ensues. Using a high-keyed color palette Nathanson reimagines the painterly strategies of artists such as James Ensor and Philip Guston through a common cast of allegorical players: the clown, the frog, the city, the ocean and the dark plume of pollution. Together these paintings function as a disjointed comic strip where narratives ebb and flow across the landscape like scenes from a Beckett novel. An intense melancholy drives the prevailing narrative as a disheartened man attempts to return to a state of naive joy and youth.

Joshua Nathanson was born in 1976 in Washington, DC and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Nathanson had a solo exhibition at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA in 2015.
Selected group shows: ARNDT, Singapore, Four81, New York, 356 S. Mission, Los Angeles, Pepin Moore, Los Angles, CA, "Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection - From Shohaku and Rosanjin to Anselm Kiefer" at the Yokohama Art Museum, Yokohama.
Upcoming exhibition: solo show at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo.

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The Swedish artist Peter Mohall, in his first italian solo exhibition, presents a series of new paintings alongside sculptures in the gallery's space.The central body of work includes two series of paintings with a mutual focus on the brushstroke, although with significant different approaches. In the Brushstrokes painting series, sculpting techniques is appropriated and transferred into painting. Thick brushstrokes are casted, copied and multiplied, resulting in a painting of a plurality of identical strokes. In a new technique Mohall retraces the expressionist and post-expressionist theories on the brush gesture, conceiving a formal minimalism. Although his work is the result of his Scandinavian culture that is visible in the work, in an examination of the aesthetic consequences of repetition, where the mechanical is set against the painterly authenticity. The repetition becomes a tool in painting, which continues in the installation where paintings are grouped by color and compositions. Both series have an element of painterly "impossibilities". In the Brushstrokes series this impossibility is the identical brushstrokes, in the Flat Gradient Brushstrokes series, it is the soft gradation within the brushstroke itself, where the artist works with a particular technique with multiple layers of paint and melted wax. Here everything that appears is overlapped on the contrary. And if at first glance they seems simply brushstrokes signs made on a simple white base, in real it's the white itself that is ultimately applied on the brushstrokes. The show also includes sculptures made of abdominal training devices that are merged and assembled incorrectly. The artist finds interest in the change of context and the altering of communication of an object through abstraction, where the object moves on the boarder of being recognizable more or less as a sculpture in relationship to be seen as the initial product in itself.

Peter Mohall was born in Loddekopinge, Sweden. He lives and works in Oslo, Norway. The exhibition is Mohall's first in Italy. Recent solo exhibitions includes "Brushwork" at Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus, Denmark and "Out of the blue, into the hue" at Galleri Mors Mössa, Gothenburg Sweden. Mohall is a 2015 grant recipient of the Ellen Trotzig foundation from Malmö Art Museum.

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Luce Gallery is pleased to announce Robert Davis’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Including paintings, bronze panels, and sculpture, the artist’s newest body of work, “Anything to Feel Weightless Again,” expresses a shared longing for embodied experience. The work and the title play with the possibility of encountering an oceanic dissolving of the self rather than the uncertain and alienated reality of daily life. In the most immersive component of the exhibition, Davis uses a RYB palette for a series of large paintings that consume the viewer in fields of primary colors. Uses an original technique to find perfect shades immerses in an horizontal position canvases in water, adding dye color and finding the right balance. Significantly, RYB is a historical model that predates scientific color theory and the dominance of RGB and CMYK in contemporary screen and printing technologies. The paintings’ hypnotic colors create a mesmerizing scene of collective attachment, of absorbing and enchanted relationships to objects in an increasingly pixelated world of grids and binary code. Davis’s installation visualizes a sustaining fantasy of fulfillment and continuity. (In other words, love.) Invoking this fantasy, Davis points at our relentless struggle to manage the disappointment, violence and unintelligibility that often characterize our desire for belonging and intimacy. Davis makes knowing gestures toward color theory, modernist geometries and designed objects, but his use of base bodily materials (urine on bronze panels, for example) emphasizes the inevitable material flaws in these historical styles. Like a child’s imperfect memory of awe, Davis’s work in “Anything to Feel” suggests that modernist resolutions are temporary, precarious, and incomplete. The installation’s central sculpture is a melancholic figure, a representation of the coexisting optimism and failure that animate these attempts for a shared social experience. Yet Davis’ work does not shy away from the pleasure to be had in these provisional solutions: he proposes a romantic oscillation between success and failure, function and dysfunction, as a kind of solution itself.

In his first solo exhibition in an Italian gallery, Davide Balliano presents a series of new paintings on wood and ceramic sculptures.With several solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Paris and recently London, Balliano seems to consolidate its organic style approaching a new formal maturity.If previously the relationship with history, the ambivalent transparency of the glass, and the bare architectural references constituted the main body of his work, today we can see a further consolidation in the research of the artist which, started from photography, formed itself through painterly intervention on book pages, performances and installations.A research based on the use of different media aimed to achieve a minimal and organic composition, veined by transcendental suggestions and by the dialogue with a void that takes the form of intuited metaphysical subject.The almost poetic relationship with architecture, which in ruins finds a new monumental identity free from the original function, the use of geometry as a tool for translation, and the Romanic references, give to Balliano’s painting an almost sculptural scent.Plaster, gesso and lacquer builds the work as if it had been placed on a wall, and the surface of the paintings, profoundly flat, seems to rise from it only by the wooden support that distinguishes their elegant structure. Through a stratified coverage of geometric shapes, often born from the decomposition of archetypal forms as the circle and arc, Balliano’s searches for the perfect balance between absence and presence, between empty and full invisibly, and in this way he changes the gallery space transforming the floor in white as a sign of absence or nothing that gives a sense of floating to the objects in the exhibition.In the same way the ceramic sculptures feed from the tension of the encounter between the illusory solidity of the shape with the fragility of the material. Contrast that comes back in the dialogue with the physicality of objects, which seem to be containers of an emptiness, shelters for a silent presence, the cornerstones of an architecture questioningly votive.An icon that seeks identity in the dialogue between man and the universe around him.

Luce Gallery is proud to present the first exhibition in Italy, and in the gallery, by Leif Ritchey.The solo exhibition will contain a series of new paintings, mostly done on  large scale. With their abstract structure, Leif Ritchey’s paintings convey a lack of linearity in his language, meaning that we often come across representations that actually contain clear references to figuration. Through appropriation of a range of techniques and the use of unconventional materials, the artist inserts elements of texture and material thickness that make the paintings dense of details that can be perceived only by approaching the work, in an ongoing process of deduction and discovery of the structure of the painting itself. The interaction between the ephemeral and the material seems to be the framework on which all the artist’s work rests. Its play reveals the stroke of the drawing or watercolor in painting that is fluid but dense in subtle colors that never terminate their presence clearly, but mingle in continuous shadings.Leif Ritchey seems to begin his paintings almost aimlessly. He gives them titles only after ending the works, sets no barriers for himself, and often making his work in a natural way, without boundaries, paced and accompanied by music or simply by the rhythm of life in a continuous voyage towards its destiny: “Life happens around you and I think you miss it by trying to overpower it and make to many decisions. Sometimes is good just to let it happen. A little give and a little take, that sort of balance. For me, this staff we call art is what always gives me the balance. The ability to enjoy it”.

Luce Gallery is proud to present the first italian solo exhibition by Matt Mignanelli.
Grattan Street, the title of the show, is the location in Brooklyn where the artist' studio is based. A place that influnced the artist perception on the city landscape and architectural view where he lives and works.
Calm is the impression that the artist has had about the Ellsworth Kelly paintings who's work he was longely been inspired by, calm and silence is probably the immediate reaction that a monochromatic Matt Mignanelli work gives to the viewer. Combination of the space mixing architectural design mode and elegance are curated by light and energy.
In his series of monochromatic works Mignanelli reexamines the evolving interactions amongst light and surface throught the use of reflective gloss and absorbing matte in the continue research of purity and simplicity.
The elegance and minimalism of the works create a constant challenge with the surface texture that plays between bidimensional and thredimensial forms.
The exhibition will display a series of new monochromatic white and black paintings.

Matt Mignanelli was born in 1983 in Providence, RI; lives and works New York. Selected solo shows: Marianne Friis Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Stories Unfold, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Nonstop, Dubner Moderne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Selected solo show: Linear Abstraction, Scad Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, Art Heming, Marianne Friis Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, Re Define 2012, Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas.

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They were six. we were only two.

I immediately knew we were going to loose this fight. But we were already on them.

A mess of breath, blood and sand. my heart – a beat on the temples.

Flicker. Timeless. Unthinking. Seconds of eternity.

The endless end and yet my jacked must be lying around somewhere.

Born in the former GDR, Einhorn is strongly influenced by the socio-political upheavals of the 90s. He played in punk bands from the mid-nineties onwards, eventually finding his way into visual arts via photography and music.

Having studied photography in Leipzig and also sculpture and newmedia with Astrid Klein, he enrolled in a master class with TalR at Düsseldorf Academy in order to concentrate more on painting.

The structured system of tiny picture elements lends them the air of digital-seeming, abstract painting. There is a special quality within the works reminding on urban graffiti fragments, large scaled advertisement prints and painterly gestures only using mesh, glue and raw pigments on canvas.

Music was to play an important role as an early means of expression. Electronic Music is totes related to his artworks. Like musicalbeats, the images’ pixel-like fragments are working their way through a delicate haze permeated by coloured light. Youth Culture and present an important backdrop for his pictures, like fleeting audiovisual impressions. It has been a sociocritical means of expression, processing dystopian visions of the future tapping into new technology.

I dig the way his mash-up method, making use of fabric, pigment, glue and colour, lends a rather object-like quality to his pictures, accounting for their striking presence within the space.

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Through intense research in the workshop and the use of industrial materials like bitumen, aluminium sheet and oxidized steel plates, Hugo McCloud makes his works as if they were the framework of a modular construction. Assembling constituent forms that are extremely distant from the tradition of painting, in the classical sense, the research focuses on craftsmanship in creative intervention, and the sometimes arduous physical nature of the work, which engages the artist in the study of the material and its well-gauged grafting into the area of the work.

This approach lies in the experience of life and, first of all, in the voyages that are an important part of McCloud’s development, during which he has learned about different techniques originating in countries like India or South Africa, in an ongoing attempt to provide an unprecedented and timely reinterpretation of that semiotic vision time has been able to nurture in certain traditions extraneous to the Occident. It is in the combination of openness to the “other than self” and the filter of the American vantage point, through which the artist has always observed the world, that the work of McCloud arises, also drawing inspiration from the streets, in the midst of the urban refuse where he often finds abandoned metals or mattresses, from which he takes the images of his patterns sculpted in blocks of wood.

McCloud is self-taught, and concentrates on a kind of aesthetic refinement proudly detached from academic influences, specifically engaged with the cognitive potential of manipulation. The result is a compositional logic close to that of the “mosaic,” inserted in turn inside a vertical construction, the additive sum of each single part.

The artist, in his alchemical approach, alters the nature of materials, sublimating them in completed works. His practice questions the limits of the medium, joining components in a single imaginary that would otherwise have been demolished, or would have lived out the destiny shared by all things to become refuse. The work also incorporates the process of oxidation that corrodes, contaminates and transforms.

The resources for the work are found in bolts, panels, metal plates or gratings usually used in construction. All items used by McCloud to stimulate a materic fusion that shapes the object on the basis of the original idea, without ever overlooking their intrinsic properties; as in a voyage of human evolution that happens inside the limits of the cyclical rules of nature.

McCloud’s works often reflect the same theme in a pattern of repetitions, altered by a single imprint, done by means of manual pressure. The dynamism of the encounter of the different surface finishes betrays a timid reference to design, though in a more complex key, mingled with the fundamental principles of Arte Povera, viewed by the artist in a very particular way, far from any hypothesis of direct derivation.

While McCloud often expresses himself by composing monochromatic surfaces interrupted by certain distinctive tones, almost as if to establish a dialogue of perspective between multiple levels of reference, in other works he puts the accent on gesture, conveyed through the heat of the flame of the blow torch, which adds a new imprint to the material, altering its contours and shadings.

The artist intervenes in his creations in full awareness of the fact that he has only partial control over the final results, stemming from an incessant and never truly concluded dialectic between subject and object, observer and observed. To use the words of McCloud himself, from a recent interview: “Every time, I try to test the limits of manipulation of materials. And when I have found the answers to my questions, new questions arise...”

Contrarily to the classic painting where the artist add to the base pictorial substance to exalt the forms, in Muted Noise Hugo McCloud witness the wish to cover the colour adding proper elements like metallic foils, as to keep silent the source from which it is born the colour, but without darkening, rather exalting single parts that shine of proper light. Like is a eclipse, the light is covered allowing to glimpse the boarders of the same one, and single parts of colour assume even more vigor.

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Robert Davis will present in March his first solo exhibition in our gallery with a new body of work.
With the use of unconventional materials like wine, beer, coffee or ash, and the combination of oil or oil-sticks, the artist uses elements that stimulate the ordinary life of every person to explore the boundaries between the different sensory perceptions related to the paintings in ways of optical perception combined with a more sensitive feeling that the materials reveal to the viewer.
Representing gestural forms, the artist shifts the point of interest to how the materials used react with the canvases, burlaps, linens or leathers that are supports for the paintings. These reactions depend on the individual type of material. Every wine or beer, for example, contains a different and unique palette and feeling.  This variety of substances is accompanied by the gestural nature of the sign. The act of painting has to be seen in the gesture of rubbing, brushing, pouring or scratching.
"When I start a painting I don't want any reference points.  The whole thing evolves visually so that there are never any preconceptions. My paintings have a close relationship to drawing and structure, to direction and rhythm. I like wine. I also like coffee and cigarettes. Viewing a painting is much like consuming it. We take it in and then decide whether we like it or not. On the other hand, I understand that painting is nostalgic. I love period pieces. I draw on that nostalgia for my palette and titles. My use of colour is the one thing in my practice that refers clearly to something outside itself. Certain events, room, places, things that I have read, heard or experienced in any way can dictate choice of colour. Then again sometimes I just want to make a painting blue. This same sense of nostalgia also informs the collage paintings. Sometimes a photo falls into my lap and it does what it is supposed to do. It is simply enough to adhere it to the canvas and it exists as a complete thing".
The artist’s additional incorporation of text, found images and unconventional materials acts as a break in intelligibility that calls attention to the code of modernist painting tropes. Naming Davis a code-breaker, however, misses the deeper impact of his work, which is all about affection. Updating Dubuffet's Materiologies, Davis uses base and addictive substances to gesture toward the real feeling of the world and our sense's inadequacy to understanding it. His titles are an important part of this, not just the name of a thing, but an indication of his serious and sentimental intentions.
"I know it's ok to be inspired by John Cougar Mellencamp as much as it is to be inspired by Malevich, I know it's ok to be a banker with a spray paint fetish, and I know when I'm looking at a Robert Davis painting I'm looking at something transcendent crafted from biblically elemental materials. Paintings made of wine and weed, coffee and cigarettes with their sacramental perfect linen below them, smears of history like Veronica's Veil above, the supports an altar for the marks". (V. Dermody)

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