Brian Calvin - Still

Brian Calvin
Still
2023

27,5 x 21 cm
11 x 8 1/2 in
Hardcover
English/Italian
Limited edition of 600
Published by Almine Rech Editions

ISBN 9782931236024

Includes "Deception is the image more than anything else", a text by Mario Codognato.

This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Brian Calvin, "Still" held from May 18 to July 1, 2023 at the Palazzo Cavanis.

Futile, bewildered, vaguely bored, the humanity Calvin presents us with is that of the TikTok generation approved by mirror-like glossy lips, clearly dominated by the excessive power of social media, the imperative of the selfie and the dictatorship of filters. Noses like trunks on flat skin tones, hallucinating pupils set in colored eye sockets with colorful make-up in geometric patterns and transversal gazes that betray a rampant schizophrenia are the distinctive features of the female models that populate his surreal anthropological panorama.

The short circuit between the courtly matrix of the medium and Calvin’s minimal and playful style ultimately generates a joie de vivre in the viewer. These are images imprinted on the retina — images that look at us, Bredekamp would say — that settle in the memory and unconsciously resurface with a series of unsuspected parallels with the clear and soft atmospheres of Hopper’s America but also with the biting satire of Guston who, transgressing the diktat of abstraction in painting, considered the elements of American popular culture — advertising signs, garages, diners, sandwich shops, junk shops, garages — an imaginative reservoir of aesthetic possibilities.

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