MARCH 6th - APRIL 17th 2021

M. LeBlanc is proud to present a group exhibition, featuring the work of six artists: Sayre Gomez, Arnold J. Kemp, Vincent Larouche, Xavier Robles de Medina, Yves Scherer, and Christine Wang.

Known for his large-scale trompe l’oeil painting and sculpture, Sayre Gomez’ work explores the fragility of representation and the mutability of reality. His exhibited work, a banal industrial post, gestures toward the often invisible remnants of industry that litter urban environments. Composed of cardboard, concrete, and resin, the subject, one of waste, isn’t so much elevated as it is rendered again in space. Gomez’ airbrush nods in shorthand to classic painting technique, emphasizing the new sense of being for the subject of the work.

Arnold J. Kemp’s Slow Season Ritual Drawing is from an ongoing series of experiments in drawing developed while Kemp was a resident of The Drawing Center's exhibition/residency program Open Sessions. Taking advantage of an impure aesthetic, Kemp’s work incorporates high and low cultural materials and technologies while foregrounding practices that probe collective fictions of person, personality, and narrative. The drawing is presented along with Kemp’s new floor sculpture, Beneath This Well Hides Another Well (2021), which materially relates to Kemp’s Caribbean heritage. Both works hold their own lyrically and sensually, in the circumstance where they were generated and in the uncertainty of the present, a quality long explored in Kemp’s practice.

Vincent Larouche’s paintings are speed, the disposable, the readymade, and the painted. Frequently created directly from screen, often untitled or titled with little meditation, each work reaches for an efficient analog translation of a moment between the eye and the screen, so that the act of painting becomes one of an exercised near-machinic transposition of the present. Given such tight parameters, Larouche produces, with great economy, works embodying the paradox of precision to insouciance in creating a hand-made image.

Rajio Taiso (2018), Xavier Robles de Medina’s work is a cast graphite and plaster amalgamation of the portraits as they appear in the work of Belgian engraver Frans Huys. Huys, whose mid-16th century etchings are largely shaped by a new sense of globalism in the dawn of the European colonial project, serves as a ripe subject for contemporary discourse surrounding cultural appropriation and the pursuit or assignment of identity. Oddly and more compelling is that Robles de Medina’s work, without this historical context, appears to us as sourced from video games, anime, or Hollywood cinema.

When compared to Robles de Medina’s also exhibited, “Removal of the statue of Queen Wilhelmina (Gerard van Lom) from Independence Square, Paramaribo, Suriname. 1975. (right: visual artist Stuart Robles de Medina) (source: Stichting Surinaams Museum, archive nr: 20-162) (2019-2020), a drawing of a press photograph of the artist’s grandfather’s labor in removing one of Suriname’s colonial civic monuments, a circle of concept is made, tracing personal heritage and the transformation of collective colonial identity from the past until today.

Cast in aluminum and then powder-coated, Yves Scherer’s Untitled (Camila) (2020) is a life-size figurative sculpture of a young woman gazing blankly out across the gallery. The model’s facial features, limbs, dress, and hairstyle - while all proportional and masterfully-made, aren’t as much realistic as they are ‘life-like’. Like much of Scherer’s work the sculpture is a composite, not any one person in particular, not made to share a resemblance, and in that absence of specificity acquires a curious power of presence.

Christine Wang’s meme paintings are oversized versions of their digital originals. Appropriated and deadpan in their simplicity, Wang’s paintings connote the brevity of historical moments and the humor through which internet users, especially those that make memes, received and responded to them. Occasionally dissociative or glib in their jokes, Wang’s meme works skewer art’s lofty intellectualism, while questioning everyday motivations of desire and how the collective inherent social power of online culture is mitigated in the real.

Biographies

Sayre Gomez (b. 1982 in Chicago) lives and works in Los Angeles. Gomez received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Recent exhibitions of Gomez’ work include The Secret History Of Everything (2020) at Perrotin in New York, X-Scapes (2019) at Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles, and The Cabinet and the Vitrine (2018) at Galerie Nagel+Draxler in Berlin. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Arsenal Contemporary, Montréal; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Gomez lives and works in Los Angeles.

Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968 in Boston) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include FALSE HYDRAS (2021) at JOAN in Los Angeles, NIGHTWATCH (2021) at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR, and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at Davis. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

Vincent Larouche (b. 1995) lives and works in Montreal. Recent exhibitions of Larouche’s work include (2021) Café de Flore at Interstate Projects in New York, Ocelle (2020) at Fonderie Darling in Montreal, and Coch/Lear/Sweat at NEW WORKS (2019) in Chicago. Larouche’s work was also included in This Sacred Vessel Part III at Arsenal Contemporary in New York. In 2019, Larouche received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. The artist received his D.E.C. from the Cegep du Vieux Montréal (2012-2014) and a B.F.A (2014-2017) from Concordia University in Montreal, where he lives and works today.

Xavier Robles de Medina (b. 1990 in Paramaribo, Suriname) lives and works in Berlin. Robles de Medina graduated in 2019 from the Master’s program in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2016, Robles de Medina was nominated for the Prix de Rome Visual Arts in the Netherlands, and was shortlisted for the Royal Award in Modern Painting, also in the Netherlands. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include if you dream of your tongue, beware (2016) at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in New York, als het hele lichaam oor zou zijn (if the whole body were an ear) (2018) at Readytex Art Gallery in Suriname, and Opportunity Cost (2019) at Galerie Praz-Delavallade in Los Angeles. In 2019, the Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design hosted Wan Destination Wanhoop, the artist’s debut institutional exhibition in the United States. Robles de Medina will participate in Senegal’s Dakar Biennale in 2022.

Yves Scherer (b. 1987 in Switzerland) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions of Scherer’s work include Leaves of Grass (2020) at Galleri Golsa in Oslo, Candids (2020) at Kunsthaus Grenchen in Grenchen, Switzlerland, Sunset (2019) at Kunstverein Wiesen in Wiesen, Germany, and Boys (2019) at Galerie Guido W. Baudach in Berlin. Scherer’s work has been curated in numerous institutional group exhibitions as well, including Swiss Performance Now (2018) at Kunsthalle Basel, Whistles of Surfaces (2016) at the Point Centre of Contemporary Art in Nicosia, Cyprus, and New Contemporaries (2013) at the ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The artist has received numerous awards including the Cahier d‘ Artistes, Pro Helvetia in 2016 and the Swiss Art Award at Art Basel in 2015. Scherer received an M.A. in Sculpture from Royal College of Art in London (2012-2014) and a B.A. from the University of Lucerne (2007-2011).

Christine Wang (b. 1985 in Washington D.C) lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions of Wang’s work include Screen Time (with Luke Murphy) (2021) at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Coronavirus Memes (2020) at Galerie Nagel+Draxler in Cologne, and #cryptomemes: women and Leo DiCaprio (2019) at Ever Gold Projects in San Francisco. Wang has been included in numerous recent group exhibitions at the Frans-Haals Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Et Al, San Francisco; LAXART, Los Angeles; Foxy Production, New York; and the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA, among others. In 2020, Wang's solo presentation at The Armory Show was awarded the Pommery Prize; in 2019, she was a finalist for SFMoMA's SECA Art Award, and in 2017, she was nominated for the Paulo Cunha E Silva Art Prize.