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30 JANUARY - 20 FEBRUARY 1997: Sleeper: Watercolours From The Museum Of Contemporary Silence EUGENE CARCHESIO Eugene Carchesio's reductive analysis of conceptual art and abstraction, demands an absolute lucidity of thought. Within his simple structures of minimalist inspired geometric composition, Carchesio loads his works with an excess of possible meanings about man in relation to nature and the cosmos. Producing disconcerting and systematically reductive abstract permutations, Carchesio employs formalist compositional concerns as a means by which complex and difficult questions may be raised as to the nature of the systems that construct us, and ultimately the mystery of human existence. The work resists an aesthetic simplicity, but reveal that what is at stake is what lies behind the image. There are no end games in his enigmatically articulate transcendental constructions, as he refuses the dogma and ideologies of the postmodern condition, while radiating a simple abstract aesthetics against a world that appears to be becoming increasingly self destructive. Carchesio imports a measure of calculated stillness, an individual conscience, into the image of a cosmos in which beauty/harmony and the threat of destruction constitute a kind of balance. In an acknowledgement of the impossibility or futility of absolutes, he neither aggrandises nor critiques, but merely acknowledges all as a fact of life in the modest serenity of his work. Whether the paintings are aesthetically anachronistic or conceptually obsolete, may depend on whether you believe such meditative processes have been entirely exhausted. In the final analysis, however, Carchesio's paintings are objects of meditation, revealing their meanings to the viewer through quiet contemplation devoid of figuration. Presence in them is implied rather than actual. |
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