Drama, mystery, and the duet between the sensual and the sinister-these are the keys to the world that Ray Donley's artworks unlock. For the past 25 years, Donley has been conjuring the elegantly enigmatic characters who inhabit his ongoing series of psychologically charged portraits, Los bien perdidos (The profoundly lost ones). While these narratives exist outside the normal parameters of time and place, the artist's meticulous technique, luxuriant brushstrokes, and richly layered surfaces harken to the Italian Baroque, when masters such as Caravaggio used theatrical contrasts of light and shadow to heighten the impact of composition and content.

In the paintings, drawings, mixed-media pieces, and assemblages that comprise Donley's Encounters in the Bone Garden at Gallery Bienvenu, he deploys the virtuosity that has made him a fixture in prestigious collections around the world. "The world of shadows," he explains, "is more compelling to me than the bright light of day, which holds no secrets. When we peer into the darkness, we have to be on alert; we have to listen. We're more excited, because we don't know what's going to happen."

To portray this realm of shadows and intrigue, he draws upon his studies of art history, in which he has earned two degrees, and his travels throughout Europe and Latin America. From Caravaggio and fellow 17th Century masters such as Velazquez and Rembrandt, Donley learned the impact of moody, undefined backgrounds, which throw subjects-and their inner lives-into greater relief. The extraordinary faces that populate his canvases, panels, and works on paper are not drawn from live models. Donley, unlike the Old Masters, aims not to elucidate the mindset of a particular sitter, but to engage the mind and fantasies of the viewer.

"I want the viewer to complete the image," he says. And in fact, many of his collectors report that the figures in his paintings seem to change expression from one day to the next, reflecting their own ideas and emotions. With their alchemy of darkness, humor, and ambiguity, these romantic visions invite us to step outside the boundaries of everyday experience and explore realms that would be hidden from view, were it not for the power of art.

German-born artist Sibylle Peretti conjures visions of childhood and childhood lost. In Peretti's works, children are often grouped in pairs, conversing wordlessly with one another or with birds, water, or flowers, as if immersed in a mystical union with nature. Her ethereal imagery and haunting thematic subtexts captivate the viewer's imagination. Peretti's exhibition at Gallery Bienvenu features porcelain sculptures and mixed-media works on panel, which incorporate myriad layers of paper, oil paint, and watercolor on either side of Plexiglas panels. Her unique techniques impart a texture that complements the works' conceptual nuance.

Collectors and museum curators around the world have responded to Peretti's vision, which hovers between fairy tale, dream, and historic fact. The current series was inspired by a growing fascination with children raised with little or no exposure to human beings. With their immaculate innocence, such children have intrigued storytellers and researchers for ages-from Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, who are said to have been nursed by a wolf-to Victor of Aveyron, made famous by Truffault's film, The Wild Child-to Genie, a feral child whose discovery made headlines in the 1970s. These children live "in a kind of private, untouchable world," the artist says, in which their "honesty and purity opens doors of fantasies and dreams."

With Peretti's imagery as a springboard, viewers may project themselves into the children's archaic, pre-verbal world. The works reconnect us to dormant memories or emotions, inducing free associations that encourage the mind to skim and skip where rationality alone could not lead. It is this freeing of the imagination, coupled with the rigors she lavishes on composition and surface, that so eloquently distinguishes her work. "I want to start people thinking and becoming more open and curious," she remarks. "The children in my work impart a mystery around them... I think they may carry answers to our big questions, such as what makes us human."
October 2 - November 30, 2009
 

Inspired, virtuosic, and deeply allusive, the paintings of Michael Kessler explore the continuum between gesture and geometry, jubilant improvisation and rigorous architectonic forms. Kessler lavishes his panels with as many as 50 micro-thin layers of translucent and transparent acrylic, imparting a limpid, 3-dimensional quality. Suspended within the layers, biomorphic tendrils branch to and fro, while arcs of line and color slip over and under matrices, balancing nature's sinuous curves with the mindfulness of structure. With this exhibition, the artist debuts a new series of small-format pieces, which incorporate the signature elements that distinguish his medium- and large-scale paintings. Immaculate and jewel-like individually, they are particularly stunning when grouped together.

A winner of the Prix de Rome and the Pollock/Krasner Award, the Santa Fe-based Kessler has exhibited widely throughout the Americas and Europe. He has been profiled and rapturously reviewed in publications including Art in America, ARTFORUM, and ARTnews. As an artist and thinker, he is keenly interested in the integrity of the built surface, the meandering line, and the joyous invention of deconstruction and reconstruction. He likens the gestural freedom in his works to a kind of painterly tai chi-a visible expression of a line of energy-and imbues his structural motifs with a sense of play and buoyance.

Another development that can be seen in this exhibition is the artist's increasing use of dramatically horizontal compositions, in which a continuous line weaves and wanders across the panel, inviting the viewer to walk alongside and experience the gesture peripatetically. Like a piece of film on an editing table or a succession of musical notes across a staff, these panels have a linear and temporal presence that is more spatial and sculptural than more traditionally scaled paintings. In these and other works across richly diverse scales and color palettes, Kessler enables the viewer to connect with the power of contrast, balance, and harmony. Like the yin and yang, the organic and geometric elements in his paintings speak not of dichotomy, but of integration.

Evocative, haunting, and serene, Raine Bedsole's assemblages, paintings, and sculptures whisper in the timeless language of mythology and symbolism. With their imagery of boats, oars, and the human figure, her newest works are based in part on Homer's epic, The Odyssey, the story of a hero's long voyage home after the Trojan War. Bedsole sees this classic text as a metaphor for New Orleanians' journey back to normalcy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "I think it is a universal longing to return to wherever home is," she remarks. "After Katrina, it was as if we were blown to the seven winds, and ever since then we've been trying, like Odysseus searching for the way back to Ithaca, to find our own ways back home."

A graduate of Auburn University and the San Francisco Art Institute, Bedsole paints and sculpts in her studio in the French Quarter. She has been active in the New Orleans art scene since the early 1990s. Her work has been exhibited and collected throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Honored with a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, she was also a prize-winner in the 2001 Florence Biennale.

The nautical imagery that informs the artist's work harkens to the Egyptian barques that carried pharoahs into the afterlife; the poignancy and romance of Norse longboats and Native American canoes; and the symbolism of the life raft, rescuing us from harm, delivering us to safety. The notches and grooves in Bedsole's oar sculptures weave mysterious narratives about the hands that rowed them-their individual histories mixing with the artist's experience in intricate layers of paint, texture, fabric, found paper, and poetry. Other sculptures incorporate richly patinaed copper-alluding to treasures raised from ancient shipwrecks-and gold leaf, glinting like the play of sunlight on waves. The vessels imply water but float on air, inviting the viewer to fill the space around them with the currents and undercurrents of their own lives. Visually and metaphorically elegant, they are vehicles for inner navigation, challenging the mind even as they soothe the soul.

Gallery Bienvenu is pleased to announce the opening of a solo show for internationally acclaimed sculptor John Henry. The exhibition is in collaboration with Sculpture for New Orleans, a three-year program placing monumental sculptures throughout the city.

John Henry has a long-standing interest in the concept of works of art encompassing large tracts of land, a process also embraced by Jean Claude and Christo. Henry's works grace numerous important museums, corporate, public and private collections as well as the collections of many American, European and Asian municipalities. Internationally recognizable since the early 1960s, his works range in scale from small tabletop pieces to some of the largest contemporary metal sculpture in the world. His recent exhibitions of works include "Drawing in Space: The Peninsula Project," a seven-city exhibition throughout Florida; "New Monuments" at the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri; "Back on the Plaza" on Chicago's Magnificent Mile; "In the Shadow of the Alps" at Art-St-Urban in St. Urban, Switzerland; "OPEN 2007" in Venice, Italy; "ODYSSEY" at Purdue University, North Central campus in Westville, Indiana; the 2006 "Vancouver Biennale" in British Columbia, and the 2007 "Sarasota Season of Sculpture" in Sarasota, Florida.

Henry attended the University of Kentucky, University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a Ford Foundation grant, the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship and earned a BFA in 1969. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Kentucky in 1996. As a visiting professor of sculpture, Henry taught at University of lowa, University of Wisconsin, University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Chattanooga State College in Chattanooga. In 1990, he received the Florida Individual Artists Fellowship. In 2002 he received the Governor's National Award in the Arts from the State of Kentucky and in 2004, The Mayor's Award of Distinction in the Arts from the City of Chattanooga. Other recent honors include recognition on the floor of the Tennessee State Senate in 2004 and the 2005 honorary renaming of North Cermak Road to "John Henry Way" by the City of Chicago in recognition of his contributions to public art on the local and national levels.

As an active participant in promoting the arts, Henry has served as a member of the Advisory Board of Lawyers for the Creative Arts in Chicago, a coordinator and advisor to the City and the Art Institute of Chicago for the "Sculpture in the Parks Exhibition" and as an advisor to the Art Council of Greater New Orleans for the "Super Sculpture New Orleans" Exhibition. Since 1991 he has been on the Board of Trustees of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Since 1996 he has served the Board of the International Sculpture Center in various leadership roles, serving as Chairman for two years through the spring of 2002. Henry has lectured extensively on the role of art in public places and is known as a strong advocate of all of the arts, not only sculpture.

Henry was a founding member of ConStruct, the artist-owned gallery that promoted and organized large-scale sculpture exhibitions throughout the United States. Other founding members include Mark diSuvero, Kenneth Snelson, Lyman Kipp and Charles Ginnever. Henry continues to curate exhibitions in the United States and in Europe, drawing on his nationally recognized expertise regarding sculptors and their work. He is the curator of the Outdoor Museum of Art at Chattanooga State College.

ABOUT SCULPTURE FOR NEW ORLEANS: "Sculpture for New Orleans" is a three-year sculpture exhibition placing monumental sculptures throughout New Orleans, from the well- traveled areas of downtown New Orleans, Uptown and the Garden District to City Park and the New Orleans Museum of Art. 2009 is the beginning of major installations along Poydras Street in the Central Business District of New Orleans. With the support of the Downtown Development District, building owners its managers, the Poydras corridor will be filled with monumental sculpture by the world's most renowned sculptors for all the citizens and tourists to enjoy. The starting point of the exhibition began in February 2008 with James Surls' monumental bronze and stainless steel sculpture "Me, Knife, Diamond and Flower" in front of the Ogden Museum of the South. The concept of the project is to bring national and international attention to the visual arts and the artists of post-Katrina New Orleans. With the support of an international field of artists, the sculpture exhibition will give local artists a chance to assist, install and network with the visiting artists. In addition, the show will give the local artists a much-needed show of support. www.sculptureforneworleans.com

Jose-Maria Cundin's paintings stand at the crossroads of potent conceptual investigation-the "morals, meanings, and metaphors" he is perpetually in search of-and an impish sense of whimsy and delight. His work simultaneously challenges and amuses the viewer through extravagantly hued semi-abstract imagery that appears at once biomorphic and constructed: like inscrutable Rube Goldberg devices comprised of organic parts.

Born in the Basque Country in 1938, Cundin soon became a citizen of the world-yet he never lost the spirit, soulfulness, and tragic romanticism of his homeland. Being Basque, he says, "means that I see and face life as a mysterious and ancient existential commitment." As a budding young artist he was influenced by historical Basque painters such as Ignacio Zuloaga and the Zubiaurre brothers, and as well as Spanish painters including Francisco Goya and Juan de Valdés Leal. In the 1950s he lived and exhibited in Bogotá, Colombia, moving in 1958 to New York City, then at the zenith of a long artistic flowering. In 1964 Cundin arrived in New Orleans, a city whose color and character matched his own, and he remains in Louisiana to this day, creating work in his Folsom studio that is exhibited internationally and is prized in prestigious collections and museums across Europe and the Americas.

A rich distillation of the historical and biographical essence of the artist himself, the current body of work offers a thoughtful, exuberant deconstruction of "portraits, self-portraits, anti-portraits, and pseudo-portraits." The particular brilliance of these paintings lies in the invention and abandon with which they toy with notions of objectivity and subjectivity, perception, distortion, and expectation. Obliquely, they evoke and update the absurdist wit of Renaissance portraitist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, with a buoyant pictorial intelligence and precision that never veer into didacticism. "I believe," Cundin says, "in the importance of the premise that art should entertain. Without this quality, art remains distant and emotionally inaccessible." With an elegance that belies their compositional and thematic complexity, these paintings engage the viewer's imagination, provoke introspection, and dazzle the eye.

Is it possible to balance gravitas and levity, conceptual sophistication and unabashed sensual delight? Yes, is the answer Doyle Gertjejansen's paintings and sculpture unequivocally demonstrate. With their juxtapositions of smooth and nubby textures, contrived and spontaneous gestures, deep Renaissance perspective and flat modernist space, the works in Mapping Pangaea superimpose jaunty, Stuart Davis-like rhythms against the impulsivity of Abstract Expressionism and the witty, self-referential pastiche of the postmodernist era.

For more than three decades, Gertjejansen, chair of the fine arts department at the University of New Orleans and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting, has been a fixture in prestigious private, corporate, and institutional collections around the United States and the world. His works are richly nuanced meditations on art history, the relationship between authentic and metaphoric experience, and the human compulsion to superimpose order upon the chaotic amorality of nature. The paintings are born of a fascinating dualistic process that begins with the artist making arbitrary marks on his canvases-sometimes with his eyes closed to heighten the sense of Dadaist spontaneity-then layering structural motifs on top, pivoting between randomness and rigor until the dischord between the two coalesces into harmony. The completed artworks open up their thematic petals like lotus flowers, revealing fresh interpretive possibilities upon each viewing. Their robust conceptualism notwithstanding, these are lushly colorful works that offer the eye no lack of voluptuary pleasures.

An immaculately sanded 16-foot fiberglass sculpture entitled Frames of Reference will cap the show, offering a smooth, minimalist counterpoint to the gestural and chromatic maximalism of the paintings. The sculpture features an interactive sound component, which expresses the artist's enduring fascination with the dark mysteries of nature and the methods by which we attempt to fathom them.

Reception with the Artist: Saturday, November 1st, 2008

PRESS RELEASE

As a satellite exhibition to Prospect.1, the largest contemporary art biennial in the history of the United States, Gallery Bienvenu presents a visually luscious, emotionally affecting exhibition by New York-based artist Milton Rosa-Ortiz. With artwork that seduces the eye via luxurious materials, even as it harbors deeply layered conceptual underpinnings, Rosa-Ortiz has been hailed by The New York Times' Holland Cotter as "a poetic artist with an unsentimental eye." His new sculptures draw inspiration from the heroism and resilience of the citizens of post-Katrina New Orleans. Referring to the works, he remarks: "I was struck by the incredible energy and stamina that the people of New Orleans have shown as they've carried on with their lives."

Inspired by nature, the artist's installations marry his longtime love of glamorous materials-black velvet, glittery stickpins, light boxes, and Swarovsky crystal dangling from the ceiling by clear wires-with a poignant emotional sensitivity that invites multifaceted social and political interpretation. His current body of work, referencing Louisiana maps and incorporating site-specific plaster castings, aims to transform grim memories of Katrina into images of hope. "What I want to do," he says, "is erase the sad or ugly images and replace them with beautiful ones."

Born in Puerto Rico, Rosa-Ortiz practiced architecture in the United States and Mexico before he fell in love with sculpture. His rhythmic spatial etudes, which he has referred to as "3-D pointillism" and "mobiles on L.S.D.," reflect his interest in the relationship between solidity and negative space. In the traditions of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí and contemporary English artist Cornelia Parker, his works are subtly kinetic, meditative, and mesmerizing in their interaction with light. The suspended pieces "defy reason... they're infused with life; they move like schools of fish, and if there's a gust, you can hear them clink." Uniting visceral, intellectual, and spiritual qualities, the works speak to the uniquely human capacity to turn adversity into beauty and transcendence.

November 1 - November 28, 2008
 

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 4th - 6-9 pm

Intricate and allusive, artist Key-Sook Geum's sculptures and installations capture paradoxical qualities: presence and absence, form and negative space, reality and imagination. Based in Seoul, Korea, Geum has exhibited these virtuosic etudes of metal and air in Berlin, Vienna, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, among many other cities around the world. As if to channel Jim Dine's iconic robes through the rich traditions of Eastern aesthetics, Geum sculpts robes, waistcoats, dresses, and other symbolic garments, creating them out of paper-covered iron wire. Sometimes she affixes other elements such as coral, beads, and ribbons that tremble and flutter slightly as viewers walk by, evoking the life-energy known as "qi" in traditional Asian thought.

"I am a person of curiosity," Geum says. "I express my thoughts using my favorite forms and materials." These thoughts often center around the complexity of human interactions with nature and technology. Specifically, the filigree of metal webbing in her sculptures relates to the "World-Wide Web" that has increasingly brought Western and Eastern cultures together. There is a delicate, minimalist poetry in the shadows the pieces cast and the play of light on the colored beads, which Geum says remind her "of dewdrops in the morning, reflecting a message of optimism and hope for the future." Suspended by nearly invisible wires, the sculptures seem to defy gravity, floating like thistledown, despite the process-driven arduousness of their execution.

In the gallery, the museum, the collector's home, these works delight the eye, inviting 360-degree viewing, while spurring conversation as to their many layers of meaning. There is a fairytale-like glamour to their luxuriant silhouettes, which is offset by their deconstructionist method. Their literal subject matter-the garment-is essentially utilitarian, yet is transfigured by the romanticism of the artist's approach. The pieces imply human presence but are ghostly and cipher-like, leading the viewer to question the relationship between the real and the simulated. These paradoxes, central to current debates in contemporary art, underlie the sheer gorgeousness of the sculptures' visual appeal.

I have been at work on this collection of paintings with assemblage for the past two years. This project has followed me from a basement in New York to a barn outside of New Orleans, in Folsom. The Chinese birch panels are loaded with enamel paints floating amid numerous coatings of transparent polyurethanes that--after many dozens of layers--creates a beautiful golden trap for the intimate collection of objects embedded within it.

Each painting is an exposure of the tiniest and the most unseeable. From coalescing cells, to shards of coursing atoms, to gangs of clustering amoebas, each shape has it's own identity and agenda. The vibrating chaos of String Theory intertwines with other nanoparticles and organisms, all of which dwell in some form of water, from a rain puddle to the deepest, blackest sea. Of course the scale is very mixed up, from protons to pollywogs, but what is beyond our easy perception tends to occupy the same mind-space (for me anyway). Occasionally these hyper-miniatures interact with additional out-sized items which have crept into my life, a rusted lid of a can, a handful of pokeberries, a shed snakeskin, a chunk of metal. Each one of these holds a nonspecific memory, a familiarity, that needs to be floating deep within these blown-up worlds.

The repeated use of the same paints and chemicals eventually developed into a system, and from this, connections formed from the very act of creating the pieces. Over the course of weeks and months, the layers built in my mind, as they did on the panels, like the stacked pages in a book. The actions and the subjects have folded into the same space--frozen in time, fused like a prehistoric creature in amber.

April 29 - June 3, 2008
 

Reception with the artist: Saturday, April 5th 6-9 pm

This project, "MACVLARIA" was born out of a consideration of the concepts of guilt and reproach, but in time and with the necessary extrapolations, the subject received enough definition as to allow me to formally shape some plastic examples that prove the viability of my proposal.

The Latin word, "Macula", means spot, stain, blemish, an irregularity that disturbs a surface. By extension, the moral application of the concept applies to the guilt and shame of the human character. We have been observing this since the time of original sin.

My concern is with the visualization of the so called blemish or stain. The show "MACVLARIA" is my thesis, to open the debate, in which we may consider the stain as a tool or vehicle for beauty, redeemed from the fatalities of our visual life.

April 3 - April 28, 2008
 

Reception: Saturday, March 1st 6-9 pm

Intricate, mysterious, and sensual, the sculptures of Swedish artist Eva Hild challenge us to ponder their integration of assertiveness and delicacy, presence and absence. Recently lauded in The New York Times ("astonishing sculptures," declared critic Roberta Smith, "...a new star in the ceramics firmament."), Hild creates iconic visual sonatas whose pristine white surfaces harken to sleek, 1960s modernism, even as their supple undulations and pregnant voids suggest the organicism of coral and sea sponges. During the course of an improvisatory, intensely physical process, the artist uses her hands and metal tools to shape, sand, and fire stoneware clay into looping, twisting, bowing forms that flex and release, vault and retract. The physicality of the approach reflects the artist's personal biography (she worked as a physical therapist before becoming a full-time artist) as well as her strong thematic interest in "external and internal pressures, strain, flow, and influence." Indeed, the finished works often evoke the beauty and inscrutability of human anatomy: the curve of hips, the nautilus-like spirals of the cochlea, the cozy smoothness of the womb.

A graduate of Göteborg University's School of Design and Crafts, Hild has exhibited widely and is represented in important private and institutional collections. For all the eye-pleasing curves and contours in her work, the pieces also harbor a psychological complexity born of the dance between public and private persona. They also possess a thoughtful strain of sexual electricity and dualism that recall Dutch sculptor Herman Makkink's Rocking Machine and American painter Georgia O'Keeffe's intimate florals and blanched-out cow pelvises, which presage the nubs and hollows of Hild's works. Within their immaculate formal parameters, the sculptures are delightfully inventive: some sharp and intricate, some origami-like; others as bulbous and welcoming as a Pierre Paulin armchair; all of them expressive of the paradox of strength and fragility that is the human soul.

March 1 - April 28, 2008
 

Reception: Saturday, March 1st 6-9 pm

This new wall sculpture constructed from ceramic panels and stainless steel continues an investigation of the relationship between two and three-dimensional imagery. Historically, ceramic art has related form and surface in quite inventive and complex ways. Distilling form to a series of intersecting planes, and images to a graphic line screen, the juxtaposition in these pieces highlights the tension between the modes of representation. Experience of the work is particularly influenced by ones' proximity and approach, potentially amplifying an awareness of the fugitive nature of perception and imagery. The rigid, dense and opaque nature of the ceramic tile contradicts the shifting illusionism of the subject. Similarly the linear steel elements suggest hybrid geometry, informed by moving liquid, ordered structure and fragmented experience.

Water again establishes a basis for the images, alluding to change, risk and the desire we associate with it. It seems we see the future principally as an extension of the past, though tempered by changing circumstances. Our relationship with water is colored by those experiences, even as we subject it to rational scrutiny. I think we continue to come to terms with the vulnerability we find ourselves in here in south Louisiana, internalizing both fascination and fear. The visual juxtapositions in the work reflect in part, one's ability to assimilate complex stimuli and reconcile conflicting motivations.

March 1 - March 31, 2008
 

Reception with the artist: Saturday, December 1st 6 - 9 pm

With conceptual sophistication and technical élan, celebrated painter Michael Kessler illuminates the ongoing dialogue between natural forces and the human need for order and meaning. His uncanny synthesis of action painting with hard-edged abstraction addresses the interplay of freedom and containment, organicism and infrastructure. Kessler's imagery evokes fossils, cells, lichen, and the branching veins of ferns and trees, contextualizing these elements within immaculate architectonic geometries. A duet between the vegetal and the digital, the painter's body of work poses a bracingly contemporary question: Is humankind rising above the vines, tides, and shifting sands of nature or being swallowed up in them? These meditations throb, glow, and sear into the eye through Kessler's highly personal sense of color: cool sage and mint greens, cozy redwood and desert beige, the zip of electric blue and the primal richness of red against black.

A winner of the Prix de Rome and the Pollock/Krasner Award, Kessler has seen his work exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and internationally in locales as far-flung as New York City; Chicago; Philadelphia; Rome, Italy; Göteborg, Sweden; and Cuenca, Ecuador. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where his studio teems with the trowels and palette knives, gessos and varnishes that he uses to layer jaunty spurts and arcs atop serene rectilinear forms. To peer down into these layers is to peer through clear Mediterranean waters, or to gaze with X-ray vision through an archaeological dig of human civilization. As they have for millennia, chaos and technology struggle for prominence in an almost Manichean fashion-but in Kessler's vision, these polar forces find a kind of dynamic equipoise through the power of visual and metaphysical harmony.

November 28 - January 2, 2008
 

Reception with the artist: Saturday, November 3rd , 6-9 p.m.

For thirty five years I painted and drew the figure. I painted people in their everyday environments, usually within their city rooms, often looking out of windows. I was not only attempting to paint their forms, but something about their being, their existence.

In 2003 I had an epiphany. One day while painting I began to recognize that my use of the figure as a vehicle for what I wanted to say about my experience on this planet was simply not enough. I began to feel compelled by what was outside the window, wanting to go as far away from the people, buildings, and windows as possible.

The natural world in its primordial state always intrigued me. I decided to paint NATURE. It is increasingly in danger of extinction. It is fathomless and yet we take it for granted. I knew that this subject matter would generate a new channel of exploration.

For most of those 35 years, I was bound by my notion that I was a Photorealist. I decided to let that old adage "to loosen up a bit", and paint smart, but not sloppy, be my guide. Working in a similar manner to the way I use toned grounds when I draw, I leave the strokes as marks, barely blended. The fresh open look is as freeing as the change in subject matter.

I am aware of the power and emotion in the presence of this venerable subject. Primeval matter endures, changing and evolving silently: growing, falling or in decay. Or, it erupts and spews forth in power beyond our comprehension. Our lives as beings on this planet are so temporary and short in relation to the transcendent quality of nature. It is shrewd in its ability to exist in spite of us, and yet we threaten it. My hope is that the timeless forces of the Natural world will continue regardless of the changes we exact upon it, but ironically only time will tell. Therefore I am exploring this dichotomy which exists. It is a mystery unfurling.

October 1 - November 27, 2007
 

Reception with the artist: Saturday, September 1st, 6-9 pm

Up-Rooted is a multi-sensory, multimedia experience which challenges our perceptions of directionality, visual perspective, and our awareness of everyday objects. The exhibition is comprised of both an installation and a series of photographs, the installation focusing on a swamp-like environment with audio and visual elements.

Within the swamp are a precarious set of trees, each constructed of quotidian materials, such as wire mesh and floral foil. While there is a certain sturdiness to the mesh construction, the seemingly haphazard angles lend a definite instability and thus vulnerability to the scene. In addition, her deft manipulation of wire to create spindly branches not only imparts fragility, but also creates for the structures a sense of time and age. Combined with audio and video elements, the swamp is a multi-dimensional onslaught for the eye and mind. The bouffant of green tulle, which constitutes the foliage for one of the trees, seems a transplant from the long graceful legs of a ballet dancer. Looking upward, we become distinctly aware of the sense of direction and height, while simultaneously recognizing our own gaze. It is an incredible elemental experience one often has when encountering Sally's work. Hanging throughout the space is a remarkable series of circles, comprised of various wires and pipe cleaners. They seem to exist only in their transience, like residual images concocted by the eyes. There is the sensation that if you look away, they vanish. These seeming imprints of the mind's eye encourage us to question the tangible nature of objects.

Also included in the exhibition are a series of striking photographs capturing elements of a former installation, Calamitrees. For Sally, it is a way to transform the ephemeral into something permanent, thus creating new works, which exist on their own as individualized compositions. These abstract-like photographs challenge our visual perspective, forcing us to reassess our directionality, and our perceptions of vision and focus. The photos appear fleeting, like images in a pool of water, some elements clear and distinct, others literally swimming in optical puddles. It is in these stunning photographs that the viewer is able to comprehend the incredible intricacy of Sally's work. One understands how each element, even in its minuteness, is fundamental to the overall piece. When isolated, these objects suddenly come into relief, emerging from the greater compositional web. Their impact is quite simply, stirring.

Sally is a prolific artist, with participations in over 60 exhibitions throughout her career. Her work has been reviewed in prestigious art publications such as Art in America, Sculpture Magazine and Art Papers.

August 4 - September 29, 2007
 

Reception: Saturday, June 2nd , 6-9 PM

Well known New Orleans artist Raine Bedsole has long been preoccupied with boats, water and their symbolism. As a child growing up in Alabama, she often witnessed the seasonal ritual of a nearby river overflowing its banks and invading the yard of her home before finally receding, an event that left a lasting impression. "This familiar ebb and flow marked the cycles of my early life. Even now, when I have dreams of flying, I am always in a boat."

Elemental sensibilities characterize Bedsole's art as well, reflecting her ongoing exploration of the natural world and our evolving relationship with it. Boats and human forms are closely linked in her work, as vessels of the soul and spirit. Noting that the nobles of ancient Egypt crossed the seas of the afterlife in barques, she sees boats as powerful symbols of transcendence as well as reflections of the native human expressive impulse in their own right. "I am intrigued by the intimate forms and personal qualities of handcrafted vessels such as pirogues, canoes and dugouts. My own boats are vessels of the psyche, instruments for navigating the inner world."

As art works, her creations are unique for their elegantly contemplative presence. Active in the New Orleans art scene since the early 1990s, she pursues her creative quest in her French Quarter studio near the Mississippi River. A graduate of Auburn University and the San Francisco Art Institute, Raine Bedsole is represented in the holdings of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the South Carolina Museum of Art, the Miami Herald and Nordstrom's, as well as numerous other public and private collections. Her work has been has been widely exhibited in a number of American cities as well as abroad, in Berlin, Brussels, Florence, Kuwait and Nepal.

Reception with the artist: Saturday, April 7th 6-9

Gallery Bienvenu is pleased to announce the first retrospective show of well-known local artist José-Maria Cundin. With this exhibition, Cundin celebrates his journey of forty-two years of expositions in New Orleans. The show includes works from his neo-figurative realm (1958-1989) to his present plastic expression initiated with "MOVEMENT TOWARD ABSTRACTION" in 1990.

Few mature artists at the peak of successful careers have had the courage to abandon a celebrated style in order to distill the mysteries of the visible universe into the simplest-and most profound-questions of color, form and composition.

It is evident in his present work that the complexities of theme and plastic formalities plus other imponderables, constitutes a new and marvelous visual and dramatic adventure in Cundin's world.

Born in 1938 in Getxo, (Euskadi) Spain, his artistic education began in Bilbao at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios and Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas. After studying at the noted Academia Sindical, he was invited to Colombia, where he would illustrate several notable publications. Cundin's initial exhibit in Bogotá was followed by subsequent shows in both Medellín and Barranquilla. After traveling to New York City in 1958 to continue his studies, he first came to New Orleans in 1964. Immediately after his arrival, Cundin had his inaugural show at the Crescent City's historic Orleans Gallery in 1965. He has continued his love affair with the city through today. Currently the artist lives and works in Folsom, Louisiana.

José-Maria Cundin served as Professor of Color and Composition at Bilbao's Basque University and, later, at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In 1975 he co-founded Tierra-Adentro, a popular art magazine still in circulation and, also during that eventful year, the School of Tapestry in Lauquiniz, Euskadi. He inaugurated a similar institution some years later in Segovia, Spain.

To date Cundin has had more than 38 one-man shows in the United States, Colombia, Mexico, Belgium and Spain-while also participating in numerous group exhibitions, several of which have been historic and critical for the recognition of the Basque Avant Garde.

We hope that you have the chance to come and personally view this comprehensive sample of Cundin's artistic oeuvre . Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Please contact Borislava Kharalampiev, Gallery Bienvenu Director or Cathy Bienvenu, for additional information or visit the gallery website at www.gallerybienvenu.com.

Shift

Shifting patterns… Shifting thoughts… Shifting ideas…

A shift in focus, a shift in chroma, a shift in consideration, five different series come together in order to examine place, incidents of life, and the patterns that influence and infiltrate the subconscious. The work has a struggle between austerity (particularly with the limited pallet) and opulence, (the complexity of many of the patterns). There are optical plays and scale shifts that create drama (almost, melodrama but not quite) over the small incidents such as getting caught on a thorny branch (Snag) or stung by a mosquito (Sting).

The long thin intaglio prints read like specimen slides, as if patterns were under a microscope. They include everything from mathematical plotting of chaos theory to the repetition of natural forms. The images display a shift between natural forms and the abstraction of pattern.

The dress prints that make up the installation titled Shift are the most playful. This style of dress is actually called a shift. The patterns and imagery within them change because of the context of the form and the scale shift to a smaller than human size. This creates a form of signage on each one of the paper dresses. It references the body and causes the viewer to consider each pattern, each element as it now relates to the body and most specifically the female form.

Pattern permeates existence here in New Orleans. My interest in pattern is how it can confuse and distort almost creating an urban camouflage that blends and plays with the shadows of the subtropical foliage. The patterned works break down and rebuild.

All of this work was create within the last five months and required a considerable amount of support from many individuals. I would like to thank my students, colleagues and friends for their help and moral support with this exhibition. In particular I would like to thank: Sandy Chism, Jane Hipple, Maureen Iverson, Blake Sanders, Dylan Rogers, my all important and most valuable studio assistant Hannah Campbell, and of course Wayne Troyer.

- Teresa Cole

Opening Reception with the Artist: December 2nd, 6-9 pm

The pieces in the exhibition Surge were developed through a unique and somewhat complex process, resulting in ceramic prints incorporated into a steel sculpture. Most of the works began with a drawings and paper models, establishing the structural idea. The images on the tiles are (often) originally photographs, digitally modified and printed out as half-tone line screen images on paper. I use these to expose large silk-screens, which in turn are then used to screen print black engobe (a vitreous clay slip) onto the surface of a plaster slab. I then pour a layer of casting slip (liquid clay) over the plaster slab, and when it sets up in several hours, I peel the clay sheet off, picking up the image from the plaster. These clay sheets are dried and fired to 2100 F, after which they are cut with a diamond saw into the final tile shape. In some cases the tiles are then glazed or modified with slip and fired again, (and again) until the color and surface is right. Finally the steel structure is fabricated to develop the form and the tiles are fit and mounted to complete the work.

I have come to recognize that for most of my career I have been exploring images that speak metaphorically about travel, on roads, across water, and ultimately travel through one's life. The forms I had been working with through the last fifteen years were drawn from objects associated with water travel, such as buoys, anchors, fixed markers and signal flags. The reference intended was that of directional travel through a vaguely defined environment. The difficulties of navigation on water relate for me to similar uncertainties that surround individual's choices in life.

An exhibition from 1998 entitled Medusa's Raft featured a group of wall pieces incorporating images derived from naval signaling flags. These works marked a return for me to the mono-printing techniques I developed and a new focus on interpreting subject matter in a purely graphic way. The images suggested a function as signs and directional markers, and they raised the issue of a tension between the work as an image and as a physical clay object, framed in steel. That exhibition led me to question the flatness of the finished pieces, and to develop a number of three-dimensional models that protruded a significant distance from the wall. Those pieces slightly resembled a perspective drawing of a box partially unfolded, except the perspective would be quite skewed. Each plane of the form was a separate ceramic print with related but different imagery.

The relationship between the image and the form continues to be a particular interest in this current work. The structures of most of these pieces developed as stylized representations of the way water moves. The graphic imagery addresses the same subject, manipulating the pictoral to a degree of abstraction. Both devices are a kind of shorthand for organizing information about highly complex systems. I am interested in the tension created at the point an image coalesces in the viewer's eye, and then breaks down as distance and perspective shifts.

In Surge, Water itself serves as my point of departure in referencing our desire to understand and quantify our experience. The behavior of water frustrates precise analysis, yet suggests systems that may be recognized, even predicted. It is difficult to apprehend, difficult even to see, subject to varied reflectivity and transparency. Our understanding of water is subject to external circumstances as much as it is due to it's own nature. Our subjective response to water is equally variable, an issue brought into sharp focus by the crushing effects of hurricane Katrina. Water is seen both as an inviting and a hostile environment, synonymous with both luxury vacation sites and the menace of the deep. Water seems to arouse strong responses in quite different areas of our imagination. I am interested in the fluctuation in our perception of phenomenon and the parallels in our subjective responses.

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 7th, 6-9 p.m.

Working from an intuitive base, yet informed by years of experimentation as a painter, knowledge culled from widespread readings, and the immediacy of the unpredictable experiences that characterize post-Katrina New Orleans, Doyle Gertjejansen has produced a series of highly energized paintings that are imbued with gritty pictorial muscle and expressive of timely metaphors. Having long ago adopted the belief that there is essentially one pictorial language-which is inclusive of abstract and representational as well as familiar and unfamiliar imagery-Gertjejansen begins each painting with a simple, arbitrary configuration and then, additively, transforms it into something compelling and meaningful. In Gertjejansen's hands, a serene appropriation of Mount Fuji becomes engulfed by the centrifugal motion of swirling brush gestures that hurl through space like fragments of ripped-apart earth ignited by an explosion. Similarly, disks of a color wheel struggle to be perceived from within a densely populated field of compacted undulating abstract organisms. Though never literal in a narrative sense, the paintings convey a metaphoric outcry about struggle for survival, bringing to mind not only the upheavals of a city mutated by the shock of Katrina, but of the multiple instabilities-political as well as environmental-that have thus far defined the initial decade of the twenty-first century.

Opening Reception with the Artist: August 5th, 6-9 pm

Gallery Bienvenu is pleased to announce the first New Orleans solo exhibition of New York photographer Aric Mayer.

On September 4, 2005, Aric Mayer entered New Orleans and began work on an extensive body of landscape photographs of the city in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina. These images are combined with wilderness landscapes in an exhibition that explores the relationship between the landscape and how we perceive natural disaster.

Although Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster ever encountered in an American city, most people do not have any direct experience with the event. Its existence for them is mediated entirely by stories and pictures.

This exhibition challenges popular expectations of how nature in balance and in disorder is commonly portrayed in documentary and art photography. Nature is often depicted in industrial and post-industrial societies as a backdrop for civilized life, a place to go to as a retreat to experience a sense of continuity and wholeness. When a natural disaster strikes, nature is then often represented as violating, angry and dangerous. Both positions serve to clarify an idealized response to the natural world. These photographs challenge this duality by presenting aspects of both positions simultaneously. At once painterly and factual, the images are both art and a record, creating a tension between the aesthetic and the documentary. Many of the popular depictions of Hurricane Katrina evoke an empathetic response from the viewers, offering them an experience of the event that is at once disturbing and vicarious and dealt with primarily on an emotional level, without leaving room for the scientific, social and political complexities that surround the event. In contrast, Mayer's images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina combine traditional expectations of the landscape, with its sense of organic order, serenity and calmness, with the historical reality of the catastrophe, which is chaotic, destructive and disordered. In doing so they deny the viewer an easy out. They are troubling and eerie in their draw. The viewer is pulled in and pushed away at the same time, compelled to fight the traditional good-nature-bad-nature binary while experiencing a much more ambiguous representation of the event.

Balance + Disorder explores this intersection of and overlap between depictions of natural disaster and our idealized hopes for the landscape as an untouched wilderness retreat.

Questions are raised about the best way to depict such an event. How can such a large catastrophe be communicated to a remote audience? What are the political and social implications of trying to represent natural disaster? How do representations of the hurricane influence public interest and support in the broader population?

This exhibition commemorates the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and also the one-year anniversary of Gallery Bienvenu, which opened for business just three weeks before the hurricane struck. Gallery Bienvenu is committed to engaging in the ongoing process of recovery in New Orleans, and to continuing to participate in the cultural evolution of the city.