Gabriel J. Shuldiner: The Poetry of Black Raphy Sarkissian / /
“Can there be a more hypnotic colour than black?” is a question that impulsively arises when we encounter a work by Gabriel J. Shuldiner, who has been unceasingly employing this achromatic colour in his unconventional paintings for the past decade and a half. Indeed, the evocative paintings of Shuldiner can be read as relief sculptures, where surface and space are in arresting dialogue. In many instances, the flatness of the painting’s surface has been entirely disrupted and reformulated through chaotic forms that emphatically protrude and recede. In other instances, the quadrilateral frame has been thoroughly contravened through formlessness. Often, both frame and surface have been rendered shapeless, as if to implode the inadequate lexical term “black” and majestically transcend its semantic value through ever-changing achromatic phenomena revealed upon iridescent, cambered bodies mounted on walls.
MATTO, an Italian photographer and graphic designer.
“We wanted to do a magazine that was mainly about contemporary art, but a bit more accessible in terms of the text,” he says. “So we do studio visits and conversations with the artists or designers themselves. We don’t want it to be overly academic, so that it becomes completely impenetrable for anyone to read. We wanted to make a magazine about contemporary art that was a bit more inclusive. When we started the magazine and it went into shops, they had really hard time to placing us in a category. It was quite interesting that sometimes it would like end up in the erotic section, sometimes we would end up in design or architecture. It was interesting how everyone saw it as something different, even though for us contemporary art is the core of it.”
Film:
Nomadland (2020) Chloé Zhao
A movie about American poverty? Yes, but also a film about the complex and varied ideas of freedom that come with living in this humongous, politically and economically disparate country. What is monetary, individual and emotional liberation in an American west pocked with Amazon packaging plants? Giant corporations engender a giant gig economy, not stability or growth. Frances McDormand brilliantly plays the resilient protagonist, Fern.
Luis Camnitzer,
Book:
One Number Is Worth One Word (2020) Luis Camnitzer
Few write with such succinct eloquence and intent on the potentials of learning and artistic knowledge, or the failures of university art programmes. Here, the artist and teacher addresses, among other topics, the pitfalls of disciplinary study as related to the reorientation of power, in writings penned between 1960 and 2017. ‘If, instead of being concerned primarily with certain particular skills, we would apply ourselves to the g