NEW YORK, NY.- François Ghebaly New York is now presenting Scrolls, Ross Simoninis first exhibition with the gallery at its Lower East Side location. Ross Simoninis artistic project hinges on a kind of generosityopen, plural considerations of connection, meaning, and form. Simonini is a painter, musician, author and multi-hyphenate wordsmith. Over the past two decades, hes produced a singular oeuvre, one dedicated to the crossing and recrossing of boundaries of medium (anywhere from a roman à clef novel to site-specific performances to studio LPs) in the pursuit of an unmistakable personal poetics.
Simoninis use of homophones, double entendres, and hidden writing schemes creates an overarching linguistic register that becomes an invisible force within his images. Scrolls, his latest exhibition of new paintings, is perhaps the most direct expression of this impulse in his work so far. The language of the conscious mind is text, and the language of the unconscious mind is image, Simonini says. You cant read in a dream. So when you turn text into image, you're taking a conscious experience and sending it into the unconscious.
For Simonini, the hidden writings in question are actual phrases he writes and draws into the shapes of the painted figures, celebratory refrains repeated over and over again throughout a single painting, but never spoken aloud. A letter becomes a smile, an eye, a waving arm. My hope, he says, is that language is felt."
The Scrolls invoke a feeling of narration through their rolling, longitudinal design. Across time and culture, the long form has been a visual mode instrumentalized for the depiction of epicsstories that chart development, decline, and transformation.
Simoninis images, fittingly described by the artist as bachannals, recall the jostling, polychrome masked crowds of a James Ensor painting. Across the eight scenes that comprise Scrolls, streams of colorful, pareidoliac sprites aggregate in fête-like formations, at once jubilant, endearing, and hallucinatory. The artworks themselves are crafted from a list of materials with origins dating back to Fra Angelico frescoes and Greek antiquity: egg tempera, casein milk paint, and plain cotton. The almost sculptural sense of organic materials accentuates the animistic quality of Simoninis painting. Milk and egg are, after all, building blocks of life.
At the same time, Simonini is referencing the scrolling that has become our contemporary worlds primary means of beholding images, reading text and the various combinations of both we all encounter daily. To scroll is to enter a mode of perception that almost mirrors our natural, panoramic experiencea flowing motion that cannot be expressed in a single, static glance. Like an unfurling poem, an exploratory sentence or even a musical score, these scrolls must be felt one look at a time.
Ross Simonini is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Simonini received his bachelors degree from the University of California and his MFA from Bennington College. Recent solo exhibitions include sun.works, Zurich; SHRINE, Los Angeles; Anonymous Gallery, New York; Sharjah Biennial 13, UAE; Et Al, San Francisco. and Shoot the Lobster, Luxembourg. Recent group exhibitions include Vielmetter, Los Angeles; François Ghebaly, Rome; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
François Ghebaly
Ross Simonini: Scrolls
March 7th April 2nd, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 7, 6 8pm