NYAB Event - Andres Carranza “Territorial Marking”

Andres Carranza “Territorial Marking”

Tanja Grunert Gallery

This event has ended.

Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert Gallery announces Territorial Marking, a solo exhibition by Andres Carranza. Territorial Marking is about painting, the pure performative act of painting itself. The exhibition is durational and conceived in two parts; the first half will present a site-specific installation in which the artist will take over the gallery for two weeks, transforming the space into a three-dimensional seamless canvas. The installation will then be converted into an exhibition of paintings.

There is an intense simplicity to Andres Carranza’s abstract paintings. Random marks and traces, layers of paint, scribbles and doodles, a sheer explosion of color. Varying in scale, his large canvases are engulfing, overpowering the viewer within their total sublimity; yet his smaller paintings offer a sense of empowerment and intimacy. An entanglement between painting and performance, the true essence of his work lies within the process itself, as Carranza states, “I feel a sense of irrational poetry latent in the humble or violent eternal qualities of paint. The meaning of the work is in its process, it’s the pure act of painting.”

Carranza’s painterly process is both physical and mental. His physicality and present-ness is crucial to the development of each work, yet it is his subconscious that guides his gestural flow as he embarks on an introspective journey. Escaping the constraints of the rational, the work emerges from latent associations tapping into what Surrealist artist Andre Breton described as “the superior reality of the subconscious mind.” A psychic state characterized as ‘pure expression,’ ‘freedom’, even ‘madness.’ Carranza hovers on the borderline of the inner and the outer world, collapsing together the physical with the psychological.

Territorial Marking explores the performative act of painting itself. It traces the work of art from the moment of its conception until its finished form. Carranza’s painterly process is as essential as the finished work itself and therefore will be emphasized within the framework of the exhibition. To achieve this, the durational exhibition is presented in two parts, an exhibition that is a process in itself. The work develops from Carranza’s initial displacement into a new space, inhabiting the gallery and physically marking it as personal territory. A primal creative energy emerges from this animalistic response to entering and taking a space as one’s own.