FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 10.14.13
The Gallery at ArtBlock is pleased to present a two-person show, Time Pieces featuring new work of Danielle Sauvé and Jesús Matheus. Sauvé and Matheus are both members of the ArtBlock community with studios in the Bates Artists Studios. The exhibition runs from November 15, 2013 to January 11, 2014. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday from 10am – 5pm, Saturday 12pm – 5pm. There will be an opening reception on November 15 from 6-8pm at which the artists will be present to discuss their work. The Gallery at ArtBlock is located at 725 Harrison Ave. in Boston between E. Brookline & E. Newton.
Danielle Sauvé‘s past work in her native Québec can be seen as transformative – substitutions of meanings, polysemous images, re-invented materials and methods. Craftsmanship, albeit of non-conventional means and materials, is of high value. Her deft use of disorienting yet familiar domestic objects merits such attention. In the past decade, Sauvé’s work has become more ephemeral, with light, words, sounds, supple and raw materials taking precedence over permanent objects. The processes of making have become more apparent, allowing the viewer to enter that unsettled world. Questions of identity and migration, at once personal and universal, feature in much of her recent work.
The sculptures presented in Time Pieces engage another subject of interest for Sauvé –the material artifacts that result from and represent human labor. Her choice of clay as a primary medium is an ideal vehicle. Employed as fabric, the clay is molded (or folded) by invisible hands in repetitive procedures. When that process is halted – midstream – a entirely new territory is opened up for speculation and revelation.
Jesús Matheus’s early training as an engraver left behind indelible, black and white traces of geometrical precision and logic. Moving forward, his acquisition of printmaking, painting and sculpture as complementary modes broadened his scope and range of expression, but never threatened the fundamental rigor of his work. His substantial oeuvre references both indigenous cultural phenomena from his native South America and 20th century modernist tendencies. This juxtaposition produces works that are at first reading, exquisitely composed abstract compositions. With deeper observation, traces of a more distant force emerge. In the artist’s own words: “…an impulse of sacredness, a cultured space, encounter with the spirit and poetry of creation.”
Matheus’s current work evolves from this sustained engagement with spare, unadorned surfaces spanning geography and decades. A primary touchstone for the artist, Josef Albers, wrote: “As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.” Indeed, the works exhibited in the Time Pieces feature fresh and surprising uses of color applied to the artist’s experienced use of line and composition, resulting in a deep and sensitive geometry.
As divergent as the work of Danielle Sauvé and Jesús Matheus may appear, common trajectories and sensitivities link the artists’ current work in unexpected ways. For each of these immigrant artists, new beginnings instigated a rejection of peripheral means and concerns and a re-engagement with the essence of their practices. Their studios have become their havens where they can resist the noise of the everyday and nurture their artistic commitments. This shared status may well contribute to the deep resonance and lack of distraction that characterizes their works.
Biographies
Jesús Matheus is a Venezuela-born sculptor, printmaker, and painter, based in Boston since 2005. His paintings reflect a graphic background in their direct linearity and layers of texture and meaning. Influenced by modern Latin American artists as well as by indigenous and pre-Columbian craft and folk art, Matheus executes geometric, minimalist pieces that are cannot be perceived as cold or sterile. Rather, the artwork maintains the warmth and richness of its historical foundations and becomes almost archeological in character.
Jesús Matheus holds a BFA from the National School of Fine Arts in Brazil, and an MFA from the Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica at the Consejo Nacional de Cultura in Caracas (1987). He has taught Drawing and Printmaking since 1992 at the Armando Reveron Institute, Caracas, and has exhibited extensively in South America and internationally. His work is part of several public and private collections in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United States, Spain, Switzerland, France, and Austria.
Danielle Sauvé is a Quebec-born sculptor and installation artist, based in Boston area since 2001. Her work engages material and phenomenological conditions in a wide array of media. The installations may incorporate light, various materials, video and/or sound in as a way of creating open-ended reflection touching on aspects of the artist’s experiences and the idea of displacement. Her recent sculptures refer to the production of functional or useful goods, considering the craft and the place they occupy in the lives of others.
Her work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout Canada, the USA, as well as internationally. She has created permanent public art installations, and has pieces in the permanent collections of several Canadian museums. She has taught extensively in Quebec and Boston, currently in the School of Visual Arts of Boston University.
CONTACT: Margaret Kruse
617 338-7600 x307
Artists websites:
www.ceciliadetorres.com/artists/focus/jess_matheus
gallery @ ARTBLOCK 725 Harrison Ave, Boston, 02118