Stuart Arends:
Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House
Frédérique Loutz:
The Shower Must Go On
May 11 – July 7, 2018
Stuart Arends: Make the Experience of an Encounter
Mayeur Projects is particularly happy to welcome “Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House”, Stuart Arends’s 1st show in New Mexico for a while, and 1st show in Las Vegas for sure. This show is made of recent work and we are proud of that.
After visiting Stuart’s house, off grid in the middle of nowhere but immersed in bright light, we thought that our main space would be typically the House of light that makes the experience of Stuart’s work intense, astonishing, ever changing. Let’s discover the intense mass of works. Metal, Wood, Wax. Colored. Polished. Heavy and dense objects born from the hands of the silversmith. Objects of density. The material shines and suggests. A concentration of sensation and feeling, distant seemingly of the artist as active subject.
As French people, we highly appreciate the commitment of the artist curious about Italy of the early Renaissance: Stu Arends encountered physically Giotto and Piero Della Francesca at their home, in Italy, in the physical relationship with the works – Who emerges unscathed from such meetings? He looked for their physical presence, he met them more than he looked at them. I like to imagine Stuart in their century. The same ability to integrate the chromatic distance and the geometry into compositions which finally concentrate the experience of the world.
But Stuart Arends is living in another century. It is now possible to live far and close at the same time. The retreat is possible while staying connected to the World. Either the encounter is experienced in the artist’s studio, far from the crowded world, or in the gallery, in Italy or in las Vegas New Mexico, with the gentleness of the artist who thinks, who laughs, who concentrates, who connects, who makes sensitive the intellectual experience and makes understandable the sensitive experience, through the encounter with his works – Who humbly puts himself set back from the irradiant works, strong of their own power, but of which we feel that a gesture, a look, a curiosity, an amusement, a very human memory were alive altogether in their birth, in their slow construction and in their completion.
Frédérique Loutz: When Precision Meets Chaos
For this new Series of Works, Frédérique Loutz worked with a sheet put in the horizontal on the table of her studio. The fact that the sheet corresponds to the size of the table changes many things. The drawing is layed as one’s lays a table (very important ritual in France). There is only to use.
The sheet absorbs interventions, but also accidents and the chaos added by interventions of the artist’s little girls. Then the artist dips sheets into the bathtub, she gives a shower to them, the ink settles in the back, makes dirty everything. The work becomes more sculptural, because there is a material consideration of the sheet, an object which she treats, with all the difficulty that it imposes, the clumsiness, the accidents. Frédérique does not draw on the back, but she’s interested by what takes place on the other side.
After the fantasy of European fairy Tales, the Imaginative Power of new mexican landscape and the Legends of the Southwest opened another Fantasy in Frédérique Loutz’s work, who decided to reach another precision. Formerly, She obtained this precision by the sharpness of the line, by its correctness with regard to what she had in mind. She evolved towards one any other precision, connected to the blind work, a precision which seems to her bigger, wider, more ambitious, and more demanding because it requires the consideration of the answer which the drawing makes to the bad treatment which she imposes to it. This precision appears by overlappings and residues of ink tracks which she washes.
Flowers, Faces, Hearts, Grids, Teeth… emerge from a colorful vortex of forms full of energy and vitality which absorb the viewer.
Frédérique Loutz is an artist we have followed and appreciated for many years, for her work but also as a Person. We are proud to give her the opportunity of a first solo show in America.
