Von Wolfe: Familiars

Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to announce Familiars, an exhibition of new paintings by London based artist von Wolfe: eleven oil paintings in which the ordinary tips into the extraordinary and refuses to tip back. About Von Wolfe Familiars September 12 - October 24 Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to announce Familiars , an exhibition of new paintings by London based artist von Wolfe: eleven oil paintings in which the ordinary tips into the extraordinary and refuses to tip back. The works range from intimate panels at 55 × 55 cm to monumental canvases at 185 × 185 cm, six foot squares that the viewer must physically navigate. All are executed in oil on canvas using a technique drawn from the Northern Renaissance of Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus: a grisaille underpainting in monochrome, built up through successive layers of translucent glaze until the image achieves a luminosity that seems to generate its own light. The source imagery emerges from a process that is itself unprecedented. Von Wolfe works with diffusion models, systems that assemble visual fragments from across the entire history of images, recombining them according to probabilities rather than compositional rules. From the thousands of images this process yields, he selects the outliers: those rare configurations that hum with a quiet charge the artist recognizes immediately. These images are then translated into paint. Not transferred. Translated. The act of translation is where the work happens. Each canvas passes through the grisaille stage, the black and white foundation in which form is fixed before colour is permitted to enter. Then the glazes are applied, layer upon layer, until the painting breathes. The artist calls the results latent realism, a step beyond magical realism: a world identical to ours except that something imperceptible but fundamental has shifted. In that world the pressure is psychological. Sitters hold impossible equilibriums, balanced atop stacks of books, bent backward across chairs, striding against the wind on museum plinths, while mirrors return their backs to them and distant church steeples answer the verticals of their bodies. Their faces perform serenity; their bodies confess the strain. And no figure is ever alone. A white egret attends a seated woman with hieratic patience. A fierce cat rides its sitter's bouffant like a crown. A snowy owl grips a collar of oversized pearls; corvids lift pearls from still water. Nothing is explained. Everything is present. A B O U T T H E A R T I S T Von Wolfe is a London based artist who studied philosophy at York University. His practice combines diffusion model image generation with selection and translation into oil paint, using grisaille and glaze techniques derived from the Northern Netherlandish tradition of the fifteenth century. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo retrospective at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, and exhibitions at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, the Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, Maruani Mercier, Brussels, and Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles. Read more Toggle Painting