From the organizer: “We don’t enter into the world as a blank slate. Instead, we are already in possession of one of our most important gifts – time – and we are temporally-oriented from the moment of birth.”
Giant Step Urban Art Gallery presents "TIME" exhibition by Artist SUBY ONE (French - Vietnamese)
Welcome,
Join us for the opening reception!
6pm - 9pm
8th April 2016
At HCM Fine Art Museum - 97 Pho Duc Chinh, D1
Exhibition runs 8th to 18th April 2016
Admission is free!
In his new exhibition entitled Time, TRANG – SUBY ONE extends his exploration of areas on the borders of vandal graffiti and paint on canvas, articulating his experimental work around the dual theme of TIME.
Those already familiar with the artist and his work will immediately feel both a thematic and structural continuity with regard to his previous achievements. A resonant, bell-like tolling of the ever-present importance of the now pervades his work and is even heightened in this exhibition.
Thinking of time as something you own, but cant be took back or buy back, can be useful. Would you find it so easy to waste something if you knew you owned it? The ticket analogy might help here. Imagine a stack of tickets shrinking day after day. If you’re not working on doing everything that you want to do when you have time, you’re just letting that stack of tickets diminish. One day you’ll be confronted with the realization of how much you still have yet to do.
“… all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed. Perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.” – J.L.Borges
With this exhibition, Suby implores us all to look at time from a different angle – to both reevaluate and decontextualize TIME. Themes that are already present in his earlier works explicitly become the central point of his thinking and find a brilliantly visceral physical manifestation in both his canvases and sculptures.
Here, the uniform permanence breaks; it fades, subsides, and disappears into the fabric giving way to an icy, bleak tenderness, mimicking the Siberian qualities of time itself.
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“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time”. – T.W.
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About SUBY ONE (Artist)
Suby was born in France in 1979, spending his childhood in Vitry, south of Paris, where he began to paint his first graffiti piece at the age of 13.
Bursting with inborn energy and perspicacity, he quickly found himself out of place within the confines of the public school system and was naturally drawn to the walls of the cityspace and thus to an emerging art form in the European underground – Graffiti.
From these years of pictorial, guerrilla urban warfare, he found kinship and expression deep in the bowels of the city. The urgency and impulsive violence of the nascent art form (and the public perception of it as toothless vandalism) left him breathless with excitement, as, even in a matter of minutes, an artist was able to leave his clandestine mark on the world, whether that world accepted it or not.
Deeply affected by NYC’s Color Field movement of the mid 20th century (abstract expressionism), he transposed his singular symbols from the lonely corners of the physical environment onto canvasses, giving his own visceral need of expression a new life.
The geometric uniformity of cold, urban shapes, all steel and glass, are intermingled with strips of bright colors and torn words on the canvas, giving his work a fluctuating mantra that emboldens the work without masking it. The result, strange as it is familiar, challenges the viewer - and its interpretations divide.
Some will find the pure essence of a graffiti artist pushed to the extreme limits of abstraction; others may see the work as layered electrophoresis plates where the artist has deposited, stroke by stroke, a personalized aesthetic DNA.
Others may read in the naked geometry of the work a televisual screen – the true universal medium of the present era– in which Suby broadcasts ineffable messages to the world, a collection of petroglyphs for one to decipher.
In an age of technological simulacrum, it’s difficult not to look at the canvas as a place of contrast. A contrast rooted in the noble struggle between the smooth, cold, porcelain-perfection of a world drowning in a flood of consistent dehumanization and the desire, the need, to scream through the stigma that builds this antiseptic symmetry and in it’s violent wake can conjure a true humanity at the heart of each work.
These visions are partially validated by the artist, when he says that each piece represents a period in his life; each stroke, a moment whose color can encode and enrich the atmosphere of memory.
As a photograph captures the image of a place and a given time, the paintings of Suby break the boundaries of time and space to condense into a single object the experience of distance and the indefinite intervals that rest between self-created periods of existence.
Proof that opposites are not necessarily incompatible, the brute simplicity of the art purposefully denies the obvious and shoots past the bondage of formalism, giving the once impossible to connect (a musical score/a line of indecipherable computer code/a plangent memory) a shared and intimate livelihood. This need to repeat motifs endlessly - obsessions, hopes, wounds – permeates the subject matter, even if it remains unheard.
No matter which course one is drawn to in the art, we are always finally lead to the instinctively spontaneous spasm of its true purpose and primary function: that of expressing what is ineffable.
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Giant Step Urban Art Gallery
Thank you !
Friday, 8 April
6:00 pm
HCMC Fine Arts Museum | 97 Pho Duc Chinh, D1, Ho Chi Minh City
