In Between Times
Sinéad Breslin, Anne Buckwalter
Text by Gaia Bobò
The gallery is pleased to present In Between Times, from April 18th to June 2nd, 2023, featuring new works by Anne Buckwalter and Sinéad Breslin. The exhibition is accompanied by a critical text by Gaia Bobò (Noto, Italy, 1995).
Sinéad Breslin and Anne Buckwalter express through their pictorial work the renunciation of an explicit narrative structure, allowing for the thickening of a sense of atmospheric suspension. A common nostalgia pervades the intimate visions of apparently familiar places and contexts, grafts of lived and remembered spaces. The scenic construction of the works situates the spectator in a constant voyeuristic posture, which never disambiguates the legitimacy of the gaze: it is us who are forcing our presence, breaking in without permission, or are we invited to participate in the vision?
These settings are reconstructed from the depiction of minimal elements, which become force fields to express the profound differences between their pictorial attitudes. In this context, the friction between the different research approaches is revealed by the presence of a common element, substantiated in the decorative structure of the pattern.
For both artists, this rhythmic device coincides with a promise of order, formulated with the sole intention of being betrayed. Its obsessive repetitiveness becomes a psychic plane of confrontation, constantly destabilized by external intrusions. But it’s in the deviation between these strategies of intrusion, as well as in the treatment of the minimal texture of the pattern, that one can find the main element of detachment between these two artists, expressed in the contrast between the glacial precision of the execution and the shameless speed of the gesture.
In Anne Buckwalter's paintings, the decorative grids become bewitching presences that pervade almost entirely the pictorial frame, outlining a full-emptiness that declares itself, substantiated in a meticulous execution that borders on a superstitious gesture. The adamantine painting, which absorbs metaphysical and surreal elements, and fits well in the evolutionary line of magic realism, breathes over long execution times, settling in rarefied and claustrophobic atmospheres torn apart by intrusions of disruptive eroticism. An electrocardiographic decompensation interrupts a condition of order and stasis, betraying an intimate repulsion towards it. The naked body, as well as the fantasy of sexual intimacy, interrupts the rhythmic obsession by disarming it with a delicate ironic vein, alluding to a psychological condition in which the domestic space is understood as the scenario of a precarious, hypocritical order, where the temptation of reality is subject to a continuous flow of removal. However, the sinful drift oozes incessantly from the quicksand of bourgeois order, like a clue that emerges from the deflection of the gaze, involuntarily – are we still voyeurs? – framed by the reflection of a mirror, or the perimeter of a window. We are faced with the indications of a pleasure that permeates the rooms of the house, and which presents itself as a nostalgic apparition.
In Sinéad Breslin's work, the regularity of the motif breaks down to become a pretext, a plane that allows for the explosion of the warmth of a pictorial gesture that denies any unreal claim to rigor. Experiencing these indefinite and suspended shots resembles to the sensation of leafing through an old photo album, inhabited by often unrecognizable presences that embody an unknown closeness, yet we feel irrevocably alive and present. Breslin's painting seems to yearn for the making up of the gaps and shadow areas of memory with the vibrant quality of the matter, as in an attempt to recompose a mnemonic distance. The renunciation of any analytical quality in the painting, which nonetheless retains an episodic, geometrically regular logic, activates a contrast which is mediated by the human figure, an element of convergence of various instances which become the protagonist of a process of permeation between body and environment.
Sinéad Breslin ( 1986, Limerick, Ireland) Lives and works between New York, NY and Ireland. She holds both BA and Master of Fine Arts degrees from the University of West England. Breslin's recent solo exhibitions include: Still Life, Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome (2021); here, Pittsburgh (2020); Speak, Memory, Artiq, Moscow (2020); New Paintings, Marc Straus Gallery, New York (2019); New Paintings, Mauger Gallery, New York (2018); Pass the Salt, Secret Art Gallery, Moscow (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Transatlantic at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2020); President's Day Soirée, Lucas Lucas, New York (2019); Domestic Perimeters, Palazzo Monti, Brescia (2018); Friends of Friends, The Third Policeman, London (2017).
Anne Buckwalter (1987, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA). She lives and work in Maine.
Anne is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2020 Idea Fund Grant and a 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Galveston Artist Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, Studios at Mass MoCA, the Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. His exhibition history includes the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the Boston University Gallery, Boston, MA; the Painting Center, New York, NY, and others. His paintings have been published in New American Paintings, Juxtapoz and The New York Times and have been included in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Muzeum, the University of West Virginia Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her writings have been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York, NY), Micki Meng (San Francisco, CA), Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco, CA) and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA).
