4 Artists: Felipe Baeza, Jenna Gribbon, Anja Salonen and Vaughn Spann
Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY
Felipe Baeza’s large-scale paintings on paper are an oppositional force against historical iconography. As both a queer man and an immigrant, Baeza’s personal narrative influences his depictions of the male body in heightened stages of emotional and physical experience. From the seemingly mythic representation of a figure floating in space to more lyrical depictions of sexual contact, Baeza magnifies life to heroic proportions.
Jenna Gribbon creates paintings that explore intimacy and access. Autobiographical experience is the raw material used to construct narrative and render her own “gaze.” The implications of looking, and of how we represent our subjects and ourselves are a central concern of these small paintings, which stylistically shapeshift and reframe their questions as alternately personal and historical. Though the paintings take many formal liberties, include fictional characters, or veer off into fantasy, they are constructed from sentiments that are intentionally exposing and radically sincere.
Anja Salonen’s body of work is inspired by Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as symbolic form, and Masahiro Mori’s “concept of the ‘uncanny valley’, in which he hypothesized what humanity’s reaction would be to robots that look almost like people, but not quite — on the border of empathy and revulsion, closeness and othering,” the artist explains. “My paintings are objects, flat planes, that hold the illusion of a somatic reality, and that reality’s location on the spectrum of familiarity and alienation also potentially affects the elicited emotional response in the viewer.”
Vaughn Spann belongs to a lineage of artists for whom applying paint to canvas represents a small fragment of the possibilities of painterly investigation. Though countless artists have painted on alternative surfaces, there is still a primacy assigned to the significance of paint on canvas. It is here that Spann’s work begins. Formal curiosity and a fascination with texture and color leads his approach to painting while political concerns influence his uneasy relationship to mainstream painting practices. Combining a non-traditional approach with unconventional materials, Spann investigates painting as a way of exploring formalism and social issues.
Images courtesy Fredericks & Freiser Gallery Archives.