886 Geary Opened their latest Group exhibition “Analog y” featuring familiar names within the genre of graffiti/urban art. The exhibition features artists working in representational or figurative imagery, but all dealing with the subject in different ways. Optimist installed a large installation made of momentos and paintings form his years collecting epherema and using them as part of the installation or as parts of his paintings. Pro176 exhibited a large group of work based off his abstracted and deconstructed comic interpetations, these colorful images have to be seen in person to really capture the essence of the work and its quality. Marat Morik exhibited 2 paintings also in a series of work he has titled “Albino World”, capturing a sublime side to the figures. Arnaud Liard featured 2 paintings featuring figures cast against street scenes painted in heavy acrylic and concrete, the medim of concrete adds a weight and texture to the pieces making them almost sculptural in nature. Blo also created an impressive set of paintings featuring figures deconstructed in space with a great amount of detail, subdued palettes with a sense of tension in the figures. Polish artist Cekas portraits of abstracted faces are intricate renderings of charachters fluidly painted on reclaimed cardboard. Bay Area Legend Vogue painted his signature photorealism works all with spray paint not using any masking, or shields. His freehand works are examples of sheer skill with a spray can painting images of the yards and city. All around an excellent exhibition that will be up till May 2nd.

GF

“The Diagram is the possibility of fact, it is not fact itself. All figurative facts must disappear; and, above all, a new figuration must … emerge from the diagram and carry clarity and precision with it. To emerge from the catastrophe … (Deleuze 1981)

With our latest exhibition we have set out to exhibit a group of artists who work within the scope of analog painting referencing the analogical representational elements of work that could be seen as figurative or representational at times. We have pulled from Gilles Deleuze’s reference to Analogical painting as reference to interpret a new generation of emerging painters who pull from representation, distorting it through a new diagram as Urban contemporary artists. The artists exhibiting further the conversation of painting in a post-historical era of art where figures and representation is not bound by historical narratives or for that matter the conceptual ideology of contemporary art. These artists embrace aesthetics as a mode of difference, not as a mode of illustration. The paintings engage a deeper sense of sensation, as familiarity is only the start of a conversation where the interpreter engages with the work. Each artist transforms and filters reality through their personal diagram or what Deleuze calls Catastrophe, modulating this reality transforming the output of painting that becomes a product of this process. Artists exhibiting work are Arnaud Liard (France), Blo, (Germany), Cekas (Poland), Optimist (US), Pro 176 (Spain), Vogue (US).