Fabien Castanier Gallery recently marked the grand opening of the gallery’s second location in Bogotá, Colombia, with a solo exhibition by the Miaz Brothers. Timeless is an extension of the artists’ Antimatter Series which features a series of new pieces showcasing the artists’ unique form of portraiture.
From portraits of their friends, their dearly departed (Ghosts), philosophers, fashionable female Japanese adolescents (Kawaii), and figures from the era of the English Restoration and the Renaissance (Masters), the Antimatter Series is a unique take on conventional portraits. This particular exhibition includes two installments of the series – timeless and ghost-like canvases from the Masters series, and their newest set of haunting images from the Friends series which includes more contemporary subjects.
While figurative in their basis, these works are actually quite abstract, giving only an unsharpened image, a suggestion of the sitter’s form. Both using monochromatic tonal palette as a homage to traditional black and white photography, and muted tones of blue, green, and brown to create dark extrapolations of Renaissance portrait paintings, the idea of these pieces is to “provoke the viewer to use mnemonic associations instead for their own personal visual information encoding.” Though using spray paint as their main technique, the Italian siblings have never been street artists nor are they ever likely to start. The use of a fragile haze of aerosol paint has a somewhat conceptual side to it as it “represent the fact that we are composed of infinite particles in continuous evolution.” This combined with intentional drips and subtle changes in colors, enables them to play with notions of perception rather than actual representation. The show opened in Bogota on November 5th and will stay on view until the 28th.
Discuss Miaz Brothers here.
