Stuart Arends
"Works 1997 – 2008"
June 12 – August 30 2008

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Studio Dabbeni presents the first personal exhibition in the gallery’s space by the American artist Stuart Arends (born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1950, he lives and works in Willard, New Mexico).
The exhibition reconstructs the last decade of the artist’s production resulting in the presentation of a selection of his most recent works.
Starting, ideally, from a pair of Sake Boxes (S.B.), dating back to 1997/98, in the exhibition Arends reconstructs the attempt, which is at the base of his research, to realise a work that expresses a physically tangible presence that nevertheless maintains the character of painting.

“I live with the work for a long time before determining that it is finished. I make it, I place it on the wall and it tells me what it needs. I do whatever the work suggests”, says the artist.
In his studio in New Mexico, flooded with desert light, Arends makes cubes, or polyhedra of varying sizes that, once placed into the exhibition space of the gallery strike the observer for the purity of the artist’s approach to form and colour. Their apparent simplicity is deceptive, they assert, paradoxically, a sublime ethereal nature combined with an absolute concreteness.

Arends’ research revolves precisely around this: the aesthetic perception of the viewer who is placed in front of one of his polyhedrons.
His works encapsulate the attraction of the open and wild spaces of the Midwest. They also appear to be memories of the lessons of the Italian Renaissance, of Giotto’s frescoes, of the Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci, works seen by the artist during one of his stays in Italy.
But the desert is his true home. The artist asserts that he needs to live in this context in order to find, in the total solitude of this place, the best possible conditions for realising his works.

Il suo lavoro parte, idealmente, da un’affermazione che egli trova profondamente convincente: “Pittura come oggetto”, frase che lo porta, agli inizi degli anni Ottanta, a lavorare con delle scatole di cartone. Successivamente, si orienta verso il legno, anch’ esso “trovato”. A,R,T: una lettera su ogni faccia di un cubo, del 1986, segna un momento cruciale.
Ideally, his work starts from a statement that he finds totally convincing: “Painting as an object”, a phrase that led him at the beginning of the 1980’s to work with cardboard boxes.

Subsequently, he turned to using wood, this too “found”. A,R,T: a letter on each surface of a cube, from 1986, marked a crucial moment for the artist. Starting in 1988 he began painting his polyhedra in monochromes, with wide vertical stripes of two colours or into a chessboard pattern. The Celadon series also traces back to this period, named after the shade of light green that characterised Chinese porcelains, a highly refined chromatic gradation that Arends painted his works with.

At the beginning of the 1990’s, Arends began applying numerous layers of oil and wax with pencil lines onto the different surfaces of the solid. He made many works entitled Wax that are present in the exhibition. At the same time the artist began to use steel, which (with wood) is still one of his favourite materials, because of its light reflective qualities. Arends’ research revolves around the perceptive ambiguity that requires the spectator to assume a mobile perspective when faced with a work. In fact, it is only by assuming different viewpoints that one can completely perceive the artist’s work: it changes completely in relation to the light and according to the viewer’s position in the room.

The artist structures his works on a complex dialogue between the two-dimensionality of painting (and of drawing) and the tri-dimensionality of a solid. Sometimes he leaves the corners or borders white in order to accentuate the bi- dimensionality that is inherent to painting.
This part of his research is rooted in the reflections of Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt, while it approaches the work of Robert Mangold and Brice Marden. But a certain tactile, painterly and gestural quality characterises the artists’ work and differentiates it from the coldness and the aseptic character of Minimalist works.

In Studio Dabbeni’s space the works are arranged on the walls and are lit according to the artist’s precise indications in order to exalt their volume and colour.
The magnetism that they emanate is accentuated by a feeling of subtle rarefaction.

Opening
Thursday June 12 – 18.00

Duration
June 12 – August 30 2008

Opening Hours
Tuesday - Friday
09.30 - 12.00, 14.30 - 18.30
Saturday
09.30 - 12.00, 14.30 - 17.00
Sunday/Monday Closed