Sinclair Vicisitud: I write on walls to talk to you (The Shape of the Throat Croaks)
Presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.
March 25, 5pm – 10pm — ends April 15.
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is thrilled to present I write on walls to talk to you, the first solo show of new expression driven oil paintings and mixed-media works by Los Angeles artist Sinclair Vicisitud.
Bringing the middle of the night into the high noon of day, this exhibition rips the covers off of gnawed forms and writhing states that blink, bloom, dilate, and distend throughout Vicisitud’s current body of work. The (dis)figural works presented are both autobiographical and allegorical, opening-up the cracks between split senses of self as symbolic borders between the distinct acts of figuration that occur in each piece. From portraits and still-lives to expression-induced scenes, plucked references or relations to an outer and shared, but dreamlike, world pour through the walls of the privated spaces elicited by the singularity of each work. Writing these walls from the inside out, the room hangs from the paintings like a mantel mounted on flames.
Vicisitud’s works are uniquely drawn out from life, literature, and fractured mythologies that bleed from the past into the present into the future in unending cycles. Painting-over old discarded paintings and (re-)using found materials, this sense of cycling between lives, deaths, and afterlives is immediately recognizable in the stature of the work. Each work is formed by a chance encounter with a particular moment in the artist’s constant circulation between inner and outer (and bright and darker) worlds. Haunting the gathered works, Vicisitud’s shifting subjects and roving style startle any stable sense of identity through the contradictions and superpositions that make-up the multiplicity of their selves. The individual strain of each work marks a certain place in time, a certain encounter with someone else’s real, and an uncertain distance between an artwork and a reality.
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“I envision painting the exhibition space walls black. I want it to be immersive and drowning.
I don’t want you to know if you’ve stepped into the attic, a basement, or a hole in a wall. Whether you enter the gallery during the day and suddenly the night’s brought upon you. I want to see what that does to the viewer, beyond their normal expectations of a gallery. Same with searching for light during the night, I shall bring more darkness into the heightened hours of the night.
Why i want a solo exhibition? Well to see that, regardless of what i paint, you could tell that it was all accomplished by a singular artist, despite the body of work all being different, per say, in a not so similar style and technique. I want to prove you do not have to paint the same thing over, and over, and in different colors, to truly brand your stylized ways. I want to show that there is no constant state of self, that there are only VICISSITUDES!”
– Sinclair Vicisitud
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(Image (Installation View):
Cuando los búhos lloran en la noche
2023
Oil on Panel
55 x 39 inches
