Re-Fresh

Lyle O. Reitzel is pleased to announce the Group Exhibition “Re-Fresh”, opening Thursday August 15th featuring recent works by Gustavo Peña, Santiago Ydañez, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Edouard Duval-Carríe, Jose García Cordero, Gerard Ellis. The gallery has invited the artists Walkind Rodriguez (DR), Fernanda Brunet (MX), Pierre Monestier (FR) and Melissa Mejía-Rizik for the exhibit.

Re-Fresh intertwines a crisp selection of otherworldly landscapes. These unrecognizable places’ conductive thread speaks to abstract versus figurative painting. Highlighting Ice Crack, a new painting by Gustavo Peña where we can hear the cracking of a glacier generated by using very thick paint strokes with a palette knife, we get both the aesthetic experience with the sheen of oil paint and the artist’s concerns on climate change.

By introducing the work of Pierre Monestier the gallery takes the viewer to the surreal planet of the artist’s own making. “To make seductive the unpleasant; the comical, tragic and the mysterious, ridiculous. These are the challenges that excite me,"; says French surrealist painter Pierre Monestier.

A graduate of École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Monestier lives and works in Marseilles. With hyper-realist precision, vibrant colour and soft, inviting textures, his paintings depict weird, imaginary realms. Men and women exist alongside hybrid beings with stretched out limbs, deformed anthropomorphic figures, or the bizarre contraptions found in science fiction. Like a visual Lewis Carol, Monestier portrays a changing world where past, present and future co-inhabit a single instant, hinting at a narrative but obliging viewers to abandon reason or common sense.

Walkind Rodríguez examines the agitations of the world, plays with matter and offers us a work that invites us to take a step to the side: “It is from the chaotic bustle of the world that a polyrhythmic universe emerges. My characters, inspired by jazz, Afro-futurism, draw merengue steps producing a sound landscape that is expressed through ethnic-cosmic motifs. At first he was a deserter. . . I left my country. Since then I've learned to play the cross: arts, cultures and influences.” A graduate of the Santo Domingo School of Fine Arts and Altos de Chavón School of Graphic Design, in 2003 participated in the Santo Domingo National Biennial of Visual Arts and presented an individual exhibition at the Lyle O'Reitzel Gallery. That same year he moved to France where he continued his artistic exploration and experimented with different media: ceramics, photography, music and dance.

Fernanda Brunet draws inspiration for her works from various sources, incorporating aspects of nature (animals and flowers) with psychedelic elements reminiscent of Japanese comics, always maintaining a strong emotional charge. For the artist, painting is “simply a necessity"; Brunet's work has been described as hybrid and dynamic representations of symbolic allegories taken from various parts of the world. Brunet's power lies in simultaneously expressing the familiar and the unknown in the same painting. She studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas La Esmeralda with the artist Gilberto Aceves Navarro. In 2011, the artist participated in the second edition of the Mental Movies Project at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City. Mental Movies is a proposal in which a visual artist, a filmmaker and musicians create the art, sound and script proposal for a hypothetical film. Brunet designed the illustrations for El Corazón del Cielo, a script by Nicolás Pereda, in collaboration with Torreblanca who were in charge of the music. The artist currently resides and works in Mexico City.

The opening will take place on August 22th at the gallery space in Santo Domingo.