The exhibition features a new body of work which has been created specifically for the church, responding to its architecture and volume. The presentation of three paintings, monumental in scale, 16 x 16 feet (5 meters x 5 meters), is specific to the site. Seen equally in contrast to, and resonant with the atmosphere of the deconsecrated church, the three works triangulate a space between the history of abstraction and the evocative atmosphere of San Carlo, its walls and floors-its skin-worn and weathered by time.
The artist uses as support for these paintings, rather than canvas, sheets of pegboard laminate. This material, regularly perforated, is most often used to display tools or items which can be hung by hooks from the grid of holes. This structure resonates with one of the foundations of abstract painting: the grid. The repeated perforations vibrate with opticality.
Servane Mary has chosen her palette of four colors from an existing system more common to printing than to painting, CMYK, the acronym for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). The pegboard can be thought of as a stencil or a sieve through which color will pass, puddle and pool, and be overlaid. The metallic silver sprayed ground is animated by these saturated drips of paint and gestural marks. The overall image results directly from a process that is controlled as well as open to change.
While the perforations determine to a certain degree the composition, the surface is not without unexpected incident: the “glitches”, or mistakes, that give the work its painterly life. The artist, by way of a disciplined, deceptively limited decision making, and her choice of a banal, everyday material support, brings her work into the deep space of abstraction. Seen within walls that have stood since the 17th century, and withstood all that has passes outside them, these paintings may visually resonate with visitors in terms of Impressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Pop, and Process art, or Action Painting at another speed, at a distance, reflective.
Servane Mary was born in Dijon, France, in 1972, and lives and works in New-York. Her work is currently on view in Greater New York 2021, at MoMA PS1, New-York. She has been included in exhibitions at the Swiss Institute, New York; the Abrons Arts Center, New York; Venus Over Manhattan, Miami, Florida. Mary has had solo exhibitions at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Triple V Gallery, Paris; and Apalazzogallery, Brescia, Italy; and most recently at JOAN, Los Angeles, which presented Remakes 2006-2018, a survey from the past twelve years, accompanied by a monographic book published by Pacific.
Her work is represented in the Schwartz Art Collection at Harvard Business School, Boston; the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Franche Comte, France; the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Ile-de-France, France; and the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona.
