Re-Imagine Everything

DIANA GONZALEZ GANDOLFI

Born in Argentina, González Gandolfi’s family travelled widely during her youth to accommodate her architect father’s career. She’s lived in places as varied as Colombia, Indonesia, and New York, instilling in her an acute awareness of the world’s cultures, their beauty and their injustices. Her work harnesses these themes by abstracting them and re-ordering them as color and shape, line and mass, in dynamic compositions whose energies shimmer through their layers. Their power derives from the interplay of surface and sub-surface, providing the viewer with emotional encounters experienced through visual means. Lines and masses move with each other, or past each other, or against each other, the elements pressing to claim their visual space, much as cultures—and their individual members—press to claim a space in the world. In González Gandolfi’s images, shapes, lines, colors, positive spaces and negative ones, triumph over or tremble under each other. They are visual expressions of the triumphs and injustices in our lives.

And yet, like our lives, despite the competition for space and identity, González Gandolfi’s images are beautiful, both visually and philosophically. As visual accomplishments, González Gandolfi’s use of color and form imparts an uplifting energy. Philosophically, her abstracted imagery, with elements precariously balanced against each other, imparts hope.

Diana González Gandolfi’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout New Jersey, as well as in various locations in the United States, including New Jersey’s Stedman Gallery at Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, the Hunterdon Art Museum, the Pringle Gallery in Philadelphia, Boston’s Randall Beck Gallery, the Hauck Gallery at the University of Maine in Orono, and others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grant, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Painting Fellowship, a National Association of Women Artists Medal of Honor and several others.

LISA PRESSMAN

Time: the creative stream in which Lisa Pressman travels. In her two most recent series, “Passing Through” and “Stop”—with selections from both in J. Cacciola Gallery W’s Reimagine Everything exhibition—her paintings are the vessels which carry her, and us, along this stream.

But Pressman’s evocations of time are not just expressions of an artist exploring a theme. Her time-stream is highly personal, the imagery conveying the realities of her life and her acts of artmaking.

In the “Passing Through” series, Pressman references transit, both her own travels through time and art, and the passing of her mother just months short of her one-hundredth birthday. Pressman has stated that “In the last week of her life, she kept saying there is the train, there is the bus...a riverboat.” Thus the images, which appear as abstracted fragments of moments that seem to float through time and space, are actually grounded in her mother’s re-imagined final realities. They are abstracted elements of modes of transport, vehicles expressed only as essence, as shapes which travel through space—the flat space of the painting; the dimensional space of a life—and through time—the time it takes to create the painting; the inevitable end of a life’s time.

The “Stop” series, on the other hand, negates past acts and therefore negates the time of those acts. What Pressman began as a meditative exercise addressing the act of painting itself, evolved into a manifestation of inner struggles, noise, and conflicts. As she strove to find a repetitive mark to begin a work, an “X” shape emerged, repeating itself and overlaying the Xs, which came earlier, nearly or fully obliterating their presence. The earlier Xs were forced back, their time stopped. For Pressman, the X “cancels and pushes back what is below, ultimately addressing her sense of struggle and acceptance.”

The “Passing Through” and “Stop” series are more than just emotional, psychological, and personal expressions. Pressman’s mastery of encaustic and oil media, her elegant understanding of color, line and shape, presents the viewer with exquisite imagery rich in aesthetic pleasure.

Lisa Pressman’s work has been exhibited in important venues in New Jersey and across the country, with shows in New York’s Curator Gallery, Susan Eley Fine art, the Hunterdon Art Museum among others. She has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, the Star Ledger, and Art Speak.

ADAM WELCH

Ceramic artist Adam Welch understands that the simplest, most commonplace forms possess their own integrity. He has chosen the humble brick to express an integrity that is conspicuous yet inscrutable; conspicuous in that it is instantly recognizable as exactly what it is, yet inscrutable as a survivor of millennia of structural materials, as much a fossil of antiquity as it is a component of modern building, be it a cozy home or industrial behemoth. A brick’s sole historic purpose has been in service to the human-built environment, but in Welch’s work, bricks— either in their natural ochre tone or vividly colored—escape their indentured service and exist as statements of labor in harmony with the transcendent experience of art.

By respecting the heritage of the brick, Welch takes license to deconstruct its purpose and recreate the form as a challenge to the definition of thing-ness. In Welch’s assemblages of his handmade bricks—i.e., a multicolored pile, a carpet-like floor installation reminiscent of a color chart, white bricks in a standing line or in a stack, with a bloody red smear across the surfaces, or bricks doused in genuine gold—objectivity is redefined, certainty is disrupted. The viewer’s relationship to the brick, this mundane, workaday thing, is changed, our accepted idea of its use upended, forcing us to reevaluate its purpose, and thus reevaluate the purpose of anything, be it a manufactured object or human life.

In Welch’s oeuvre, the solid brick stands in for life’s fluctuating, uncertain experiences and relationships. The certainty with which we define a brick—a building block—is shattered by Welch’s freeing of its traditional purpose. His, and our, redefined relationship to this simple piece of clay leads us into an experience of the transcendent.

Welch’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in venues nationwide, including New Jersey’s Hunterdon Art Museum, New York’s Hunter College, AIR Gallery, and Chautauqua Center for Visual Arts, American University in Washington, DC, the University of Kansas, and numerous others. He currently serves as the Director of Greenwich House Pottery in New York City, appointed to the position in 2010. In addition to his directorship and teaching duties at Greenwich House, Welch is a widely read contributor to several ceramic art publications, and is a lecturer on the faculty of Princeton University. He is the recipient of significant awards from the Warhol Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University, and others.

For more information about these artists please contact J. Cacciola Gallery W at info@jcacciolagalleryw.com