Winter collective exhibition

January 8 - January 31, 2015

UNIX Gallery is pleased to present our Winter Collective Exhibition featuring works by Engels, Alfredo Scaroina, and KwangHo Shin on view at UNIX Gallery New York, 532 W 24th St. from January 8th - January 31st, 2015. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 8th, 2014 from 6 - 8 PM.

Art is a natural process for Haitian-born New York-based abstract artist Engels. He can create with anything, as evidenced by his diverse media. Engels builds with wood, paper, and layers of paint. He questions what painting is, often creating works that are left explicit. “Stretchers lay bare. Canvas is crumpled, torn, or shredded. Staples can be more than simple fasteners and can function as paint.” For Engels, a work does not have to be one thing or another. A painting can have elements of photography or sculpture, blurring the conventions between disciplines.  “I believe in the spirit. Sometimes I enter the work; we become one.” Engels has the uncanny ability to create pieces as if from nothing, always listening to his senses. The process speaks to the poetry of his childhood, the survival strategies that Haitians use to get from one day to the next.  The strict economy of line and texture, the use of everyday objects, and makeshift elegance recalls his grandmother’s home in Port-au-Prince, which against all odds, had splendor.

In his paintings, KwangHo Shin attempts to capture the complexity of human emotion and the experience of the mind as we perceive it visually. Harkening back to Abstract Expressionism, Shin employs intense and vibrant colors in order to depict individualistic expression of emotion and a sense of self. He applies oils and charcoal in thick brushstrokes to distort and exaggerate the subject’s facial features and confront the viewer with the resulting emotional impact these painterly effects have on our understanding of the subject. Shin deliberately neglects the use of harmonious color and precise form in an effort to extend the internal mental world into an external reality. Shin is able to document the psychological change and clash that arises in the self in his portraits. “... the fear of the blank canvas is dissolved as the colors arrive safely and the shapes are formed on the picture plane... this moment is the process of bringing out something from the Artist’s inner spirit - it is the climax of the creative energy” (Yu MyeongJin).

Alfredo Scaroina explores the powerful influence the creative process has on his paintings. His techniques both dictate and reveal the subject matter, as he starts using different mediums and an array of reclaimed materials such as recycled mail, paper, found fabrics, archival newsprint, recycled magazines, old canvases, dirt, sand, metal, dust and everything he can find to create complex, urban decayed layered compositions. Scaroina also addresses how his paintings influence the emotional and physiological perception of the individual from one culture to another, as well as the collective unconsciousness in the Jungian sense. He incorporates archetypal symbols and primitive motifs into his paintings as a kind of universal language that is recognizable to people from many different backgrounds. Scaroina embraces experimental techniques and materials as a way to express fresh ideas about the function of art in a multicultural world.

Engels

Alfredo Scaroina

KwangHo Shin