NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Berggruen is presenting Baoying Huang, Alexandria Mento, Nina Molloy, Cate Pasquarelli.
Across painting and sculpture, Baoying Huang, Alexandria Mento, Nina Molloy, and Cate Pasquarelli challenge habitual ways of seeing. Through reflections, transparency, digital mediation, and subtle disruptions of expectation, their works destabilize distinctions between the real and the perceived.
Baoying Huang’s paintings collapse multiple layers of space within domestic and consumer environments. Many of her paintings are based on photographs taken from the street while looking through the storefront windows of cafés and restaurants. From this vantage point, she captures both the interior beyond the glass and the reflections layered upon its surface. In her painting Pickled Lemon Tree, a lemon tree appears in front of a cafe window, a figure bends over behind the window, and two figures walk through a passageway in the distance. Juxtaposed on top of this cafe interior is a translucent rendering of a verdant tree. When her paintings are not framed by windows, they are framed by vessels such as the white container holding tomatoes in Wet Playground. Huang stated that she is most interested in how an object can become a painted form. Often working with a flat brush, Huang reduces objects to geometric shapes that continually return attention to the material reality of the painted surface.
Alexandria Mento probes the relationships between computer vision training and still life painting, and between real and virtual environments. She mines image datasets used to train computer vision models. Through extensive research, she compiles her own selection of images that stand out to her, focusing on a broad array of daily moments such as a fish, an alarm clock, a teacup, and a spiderweb. Her selections draw parallels to the tradition of still life painting. Whereas earlier works layered multiple images through meticulous paint application, she now seeks to depict low-resolution source images as faithfully as possible. Using the grisaille technique before adding color, Mento captures each digital artifact, including errant, color-straying pixels. The resulting paintings gesture toward the way physical space has become entangled with digital environments in contemporary life.
Nina Molloy captures the space inside painted objects across various genres of representational painting. In Log Crossing, she deconstructs a log into an assemblage of rods that resemble armature. These rods are rendered translucently, allowing a viewer to see both within and through the forms, suggesting the movement of air and energy. The logs rest atop a shallow body of water whose surface reveals moss, reflections, and the creekbed below. Although the subject matter in Still Life with One of the Twelve Heavenly Generals differs markedly from her landscapes, Molloy explores similar concerns by rendering clear glass vessels and trompe l’oeil flies that appear to rest on the background of the still life, or perhaps on the surface of the painting itself. Because the painting was made from direct observation, the proportions of the snuff bottle are subtly inaccurate. While such an object could not exist in reality, these subtle distortions more closely approximate the lived experience of observing the object, the artist, and shifting conditions of light than photographic exactitude could. Molloy alludes to the energy potential and life force in all of her paintings, whether landscape, figuration, or still life.
Cate Pasquarelli’s sculptures resemble miniature small towns where pastoral American life becomes surreal, recasting vast social narratives into carefully constructed, compressed scenes. They evoke collaborative memory, sentimentality, and imagined histories. She builds many of the elements in her sculptures through wood carving, assembling, and hand painting. Rich with symbolism, her surreal scenes reframe our contemporary concerns with humor, speculation, and allegory. Her sculpture Relic depicts a police investigation of an excavated school bus in a classic New England small town. The work becomes a microcosm for a larger portrait of our country and examines the aging social structures that struggle to adapt with time. Pasquarelli’s sculpture Movers depicts a plane pulling a house across water with a sense of humor about the obliviousness of its residents. Her water sculptures highlight a willful blindness in the midst of disaster, sparking discussions about climate issues and a resistance to social change. Through nuanced attention to setting and built environment, Pasquarelli animates the imagined residents of her scenes while reflecting broader cultural tensions around tradition, nostalgia, hope, and uncertainty about the future.
Through a range of perspectival strategies, these artists unsettle familiar ways of seeing. Reflections, digital reproduction, transparency, and surreal interventions reveal the instability of perception itself. By drawing attention to the gaps between observation, representation, and understanding, this group exhibition offers a reminder that seeing is never entirely objective.
