“Three Paintings”
Benjamin Bertocci, Jack Lawler & Todd Lim
January 3rd – January 7th, 2024
Reception: January 3rd, 2024, 6 – 9pm
No Gallery – 105 Henry Street #4 NYC 10002
>Jump to Exhibition Text by Chloe Bartlewski
Single Works
Benjamin Bertocci – Saint Gerome in the Wilderness, 2023 – oil on canvas – 36 x 48 x 1.5 in. (91.44 x 121.92 x 3.81 cm)
Jack Lawler – The Race, 2023 – oil on canvas – 30 x 30 x 1.5 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm)
Todd Lim – Ghost Chair (Pieta), 2018 – acrylic on canvas – 57 x 57 x 2 in. (144.78 x 144.78 x 5.08 cm)
Lean in and count the pixels, red and green and blue. Click pause, suspend neuromechanical stimulation. Stare, burn new forms into the layer between the outer and inner world. The screen becomes part of the physical structure of the brain. Sit and watch it flicker. Time dilation sets in and you’re free. You’ve become absent, you’ve become the chair you lean on. Invisible. Stream of subconsciousness informing everything you think. Image flashing at a speed rendering its stillness imperceptible. Your stillness imperceptible. Time, sequence time, passage of time removed. As you behold it, the image fluctuates between meaningless and profound. Are you bored? Is the screen boring you?
Did you begin to look because you were bored, or are you bored because you looked. It’s getting harder to tell. It all feels the same either way. Pause on any image, and the once profound morphs into the mundane. Sensory fatigue sets in, images cease to have meaning. The man kneeling becomes a tricolored allegory, a room suspended in anticipation loses its significance in the absence of a witness. Dust particles hang frozen in the air, curtains stand vertically, and the implied motion exists only in the theater of your consciousness. The boundary blurs, the screen intertwining with the fabric of cognition. In this amalgamation of pixels and contemplation, the screen becomes a mirror reflecting not just the digital realm but the intricacies of your own psyche. The boundaries between external stimuli and internal reflections dissolve, leaving you in a state of suspended perception, caught between the tangible and the ephemeral.
Lean out, last look.
Unpause.
Exhibition Text ~ written by Chloe Bartlewski
Benjamin Bertocci (b. 1975, Lenox, Massachusetts) has been living and working in N.Y.C. since 2005. He was raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, UMASS Amherst, and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He worked as Visiting Assistant professor of Printmaking at Southern Illinois university, and as Assistant Manager of Painting for Jeff Koons until 2020. He now works out of his studio in Long Island City, Queens, and lives with his small family in nearby Astoria.
Jack Lawler (b.1994, New Jersey) is an American artist living and working in New York City, and has received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited in New York at institutions such as Mery Gates and Jack Hanley Gallery, and had his first solo presentation at No Gallery in 2022.
A digital archaeologist of sorts, Jack sources early computer imagery to craft his images that are not without their sense of irony given the final work presented are paintings on canvas. Embodying a past aesthetic for potential futures, Lawler’s paintings evoke a sense of displaced nostalgia. There is no attempt to represent specific real life situations, instead operating on a surreal dream-logic to entangle the viewer in a space which inhabits remembered and invented narratives simultaneously. At some point in the not-so-distant past, the imagery which Lawler’s paintings are evocative of represented a future where technology presented the potential for utopian living. The glowing pixels of early arcade machines, primarily played by children and teenagers, were altars at which hours were spent in service of entertainment – they were just killing time because time was the only thing both guaranteed and abundant.
Todd Lim (b.1964, Chester, NY) is an Asian American artist living and working in Lake Worth, Florida, and has received his BFA from School of Visual Arts New York City. Lim has exhibited in commercial art galleries and institutions both nationally and internationally. His works are included in the public collections of Smithsonian Museum, Arkansas State Univ. Museum, Brown Univ. Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, MIT Museum, Newark Public Library, New York Public Library, Portland Museum of Art, Print Consortium of Kansas City, Univ. of Oklahoma Museum and Ashforth Art Collection.