kaufmann repetto is happy to announce Dianna Molzan’s third solo show at the gallery, presenting new paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects. The title, Double Take, is key to the multi-layered viewing experience, triggered by the interplay of associations and reminiscences that link the works throughout the exhibition.
A playful déja vu effect underpins Molzan’s use of the twin spaces of the Milanese gallery, by using the two central, symmetrical rooms as an echoing premise, one room resembling the spatial configuration and art placement of the other without being identical.
Though flowers and floral patterns are a repeating motif in the artist’s practice, these particular forms, rendered as simple generic archetypes, are the latest works that focus on familiar and cultural enduring objects, a theme already explored in her previous series of individual vanity mirrors and doors. The compositions are nearly cartoonish, with bold outlined color, while the unstable ground for the meticulously executed paintings is an intricate surface of hanging threads, that are able to undulate in response to sudden movements of the viewer in close proximity, gently animating the flower.
The stretcher bars are included as minimal conceived trompe l’oeil framing device, and what is underneath is made overt, the rendering and real merging through the gaps in the string surface. The flower shapes float in front of the “empty” rectangle space, their stems spilling out of the pictorial space towards the ground. The classical categories of painterly investigation such as figure/ground, positive/negative undergo a strange twist in these works, who are quintessentially hybrids, both on an imaginative and material level.
This scrutiny is perpetuated in a group of small-sized drawings which resume the same flower motifs of the string paintings, as if the artist wanted to offer a way to grasp them as solid compositions, after the difficult task of capturing them on the moveable strands of thread.
The other smaller abstract works in the show merge fictional and factual elements, painted compositions seem to hang from real pegs; woven and collaged textured surfaces cast real and artificial made shadows. One of the paintings is accompanied by its doppelgänger that has become a sculptural wall installation. Elsewhere two works of the same small size can be described as having textured colored surface (one with an orange, the other with a blue base) with tufts of thread coming out of holes (differentiated by length, circumference, and number), hence generating distinct impressions. This variation on type from one room to the other is also seen in the large woven works on the two back walls that have the same dimensions, but different personalities.
Treating painting as installation objects that respond to their environment is fundamental to Molzan’s approach to exhibition, and in Double Take she has extended this focus by introducing large, bodily plush grids that function as geometric abstraction starting on the wall and spilling onto the floor to become a soft seating arrangement. These can be modified, extended, and multiplied according to location and continue the blurring of categories in keeping with her other works. With these unexpectedly large and sensuous installations, the artist consolidates her interest to challenge the dichotomy of painting versus sculpture, and her favoring of ‘thingness’ over imagery.
