French / Moore:
The Unbearable Lightness of Form
David French
French's work is informed by a deep engagement with Baroque
forms. The fragment, the ruin and dynamically twisted shapes permeate his
entire oeuvre, which is a kind of grand theater of psychosexual anthropomorphisms.
The seamless fabrication of his sculptures echoes the Baroque fascination with
virtuosity while his choice of synthetic golds, royal purples and saturated
reds allude to the power of inorganic objects and class politics.
Implicit in French's folding and curvilinear shapes is a
different kind of story about the base matter of creation and the play of
creative contingency. The spiky abstractions of blowfish-like forms, swirling
organic motifs and hard earthen topologies all hold equal sway in French's art
practice. Over the last few years however, he has become more engaged with the
rhetorical devices of prestige. In such a move, the formal aspects of Baroque
aesthetics are married to the politics of the present by evoking the privilege
accorded to high-end commodity forms. Some of French's most recent works have made use of rapid prototyping techniques that create the feel of a techno-Baroque
aesthetic, or what the theorist Norman Klein calls an Electronic Baroque that
evades all traces of the human touch.
This shift in French's work charts a path that is as much
about the evolution of forms as it is the politics of cultural production.
Caught between seduction and simulation, his works point to a history of forms
and colors that take as much from pre- and post-modern art as they do the ethos
of high modernism. By combining computational and industrial fabrication
techniques with a radical sensualism, French's work makes us rethink the
potential of material embodiment in a way that is as rare as it is beautiful.
Bio: David French was born in England and earned his MA in
Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has exhibited his work in
Tokyo, Brussels, Istanbul and Los Angeles. French has been commissioned to
create work for public projects as well as private homes. He was presented with
a commendation for the Public Art Project of the year by Huntington Beach's
Allied Arts Board. His work can also be seen this month at D.E.N. Contemporary
in the Pacific Design Center. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Melanie Moore
The work of Melanie Moore revolves around themes both
organic and cosmic, formal and natural. Hers is an evolving art, one based on
the germination of hidden and secret processes. As a sustained meditation on
macro and micro-logical processes, Moore's abstract paintings often resemble
cellular mitosis, embryonic growth, or the nebulous becomings of celestial
bodies. Everywhere we find evidence of divergent permutations, sudden mutations
and the slow gestation of trace forms in the process of unfolding.
Moore's work was previously invested in time-based processes
and dissection of abstract forms. She achieved this through different
strategies of taxonomy, often painting on multi-layered transparent panels that
could be recombined to form a single work. As a virtual vivisection of gestural
spills, pours and selective interventions, theses early works subdivided action
painting into specific acts by highlighting the temporal dimension of gestural imagery.
Over time, these additive strategies gave way to a dialog that was more overtly
concerned with the rhetorics of display and disparate knowledges of application.
This gave her work a new sense of complexity and a certain distance from
expressive models of abstract painting that are still very much in vague today.
Most recently however, her art practice has begun to
capitalize on the power of singular forms and iconic images. Often highlighting
just one or two floating forms, and sticking to a reduced pallet dominated by grays,
black and silvers, Moore has chosen to focus on those elements which have
become the hallmark of her artistic process. These qualities might best be
described as a subtly of touch, a deft sense of compactness and an intimacy of
scale appropriate to the work. Dynamic, delicate and amorphous, her paintings
evoke an art of wonder — one which is focused on the natural world around us as well
as those worlds that regularly escape perception. This is both the nature of
their purchase in the present and their enduring contribution to the idiom of
abstract art.