Galerie Pepe
G A L E R I E P E P E OPEN WED-FRI 12pm-6pm, SAT 11am-3pm AND BY APPOINTMENT AT MAIL@GALERIEPEPE.COM
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present Echea an exhibition by artist, composer and percussionist Eli Keszler (b. Boston, MA). April 11th - June 8th, 2024
I’m a musician and composer by trade, but I’ve been feeling a little bored lately. So when Pepe proposed doing an exhibition of visual art at his gallery, I took the chance. The natural if predictable move for me was to “explore the link” between music and art.
On my daily trips across lower Manhattan from my apartment to the studio, I began looking for inspiration. It's always been “ground zero” down here for all sorts of new and interesting developments, for lack of a better phrase. These days, the first thing you notice is the migrants spilling into Tompkins Square Park from the nearby St. Brigid intake center. There was an earthquake in New York on Friday. And an eclipse on Monday. It’s exhilarating to think we’re living in “end times,” but most likely the show just goes on.
In Echea, the figures are conjoined yet disjointed. Men and women, young and old. Adults are children, and children are adults. It’s all the same. The barren and washed-out American landscapes speak for themselves. Child soldiers, broken homes, American flags, Bald Eagles, aging bodies on display, all sorts of unusual groupings and paranoid inner realities. I worked both slowly and quickly on these pieces, taking my time coming up with the initial “concepts” and then smearing and rubbing graphite and wax onto the image surfaces.
“Echea” comes from the Greek word for “sounding vase.” Traditionally, these ceramic vessels were used to amplify sound in temples and, later, churches. In antiquity, the vessels were designed to be proportional with Greek modes, acting as a kind of early “sound system.” In other words, each vessel corresponds sympathetically to a unique tone in the Greek scale.
Produced in collaboration with ceramicist and sound artist Reuben Son, the sculpture in the gallery is fitted with ceramic tongues and hidden speakers. The sounds they emit resonate throughout the space and harmonize with the surroundings. Quiet at first, distant, and a little uncanny, they lend an air of innocence to the work.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the relationship between the “generative” and the degenerate. “Ugly Beauty,” the title of one of my favorite Thelonious Monk songs, sums it up well. There’s a point where the two inevitably meet. To be a true environmentalist, you have to love garbage. I’m just trying to watch it burn in peace.
Eli Keszler
I’m a musician and composer by trade, but I’ve been feeling a little bored lately. So when Pepe proposed doing an exhibition of visual art at his gallery, I took the chance. The natural if predictable move for me was to “explore the link” between music and art.
On my daily trips across lower Manhattan from my apartment to the studio, I began looking for inspiration. It's always been “ground zero” down here for all sorts of new and interesting developments, for lack of a better phrase. These days, the first thing you notice is the migrants spilling into Tompkins Square Park from the nearby St. Brigid intake center. There was an earthquake in New York on Friday. And an eclipse on Monday. It’s exhilarating to think we’re living in “end times,” but most likely the show just goes on.
In Echea, the figures are conjoined yet disjointed. Men and women, young and old. Adults are children, and children are adults. It’s all the same. The barren and washed-out American landscapes speak for themselves. Child soldiers, broken homes, American flags, Bald Eagles, aging bodies on display, all sorts of unusual groupings and paranoid inner realities. I worked both slowly and quickly on these pieces, taking my time coming up with the initial “concepts” and then smearing and rubbing graphite and wax onto the image surfaces.
“Echea” comes from the Greek word for “sounding vase.” Traditionally, these ceramic vessels were used to amplify sound in temples and, later, churches. In antiquity, the vessels were designed to be proportional with Greek modes, acting as a kind of early “sound system.” In other words, each vessel corresponds sympathetically to a unique tone in the Greek scale.
Produced in collaboration with ceramicist and sound artist Reuben Son, the sculpture in the gallery is fitted with ceramic tongues and hidden speakers. The sounds they emit resonate throughout the space and harmonize with the surroundings. Quiet at first, distant, and a little uncanny, they lend an air of innocence to the work.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the relationship between the “generative” and the degenerate. “Ugly Beauty,” the title of one of my favorite Thelonious Monk songs, sums it up well. There’s a point where the two inevitably meet. To be a true environmentalist, you have to love garbage. I’m just trying to watch it burn in peace.
Eli Keszler
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PAST
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present Autofiction an exhibition by writer and artist Gary Indiana (b. 1950, Derry, NH). February 6th - March 23rd, 2024
Autofiction
Every picture tells a story. Every story has other stories lurking behind it, stories that are not being told. For example, why a picture was made, under what circumstances, for what purpose, if any, or, if you like, what the person who made the picture was thinking about when the picture was made.
In most instances I could tell you these things, but I’d rather not, and instead will say that this show is “about” words and images, words that contradict or collude with the images they collide with, in juxtaposition with wordless images that “speak for themselves,” if mostly in ambiguous fashion.
In some cases language nibbles at the edges of intelligibility before relapsing into silence, a silence I know well from many spells of becoming unable to write, and unable to make sense of a world that has become, throughout my lifetime, more and more insensibly garbled. Some of these pictures refer to phases of a political and literary education, virtually all of them experienced outside of school. Others rebut or mirror the confusions produced by the glut of meaningless, banal, and coercive pictures and verbiage the present era inflicts on everyone through mass media. And others still are just there for the simple pleasure of looking at something that can be understood in many different ways.
Gary Indiana
Autofiction
Every picture tells a story. Every story has other stories lurking behind it, stories that are not being told. For example, why a picture was made, under what circumstances, for what purpose, if any, or, if you like, what the person who made the picture was thinking about when the picture was made.
In most instances I could tell you these things, but I’d rather not, and instead will say that this show is “about” words and images, words that contradict or collude with the images they collide with, in juxtaposition with wordless images that “speak for themselves,” if mostly in ambiguous fashion.
In some cases language nibbles at the edges of intelligibility before relapsing into silence, a silence I know well from many spells of becoming unable to write, and unable to make sense of a world that has become, throughout my lifetime, more and more insensibly garbled. Some of these pictures refer to phases of a political and literary education, virtually all of them experienced outside of school. Others rebut or mirror the confusions produced by the glut of meaningless, banal, and coercive pictures and verbiage the present era inflicts on everyone through mass media. And others still are just there for the simple pleasure of looking at something that can be understood in many different ways.
Gary Indiana
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NATE BOYCE
A Light That Dies in My Mouth
Through January 20th, 2024
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present A Light That Dies in My Mouth an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Nate Boyce (b. 1982, Kansas City, MO). November 16th, 2023 - January 20th, 2024
In the back of the gallery the animation, A Light That Dies in My Mouth, plays against a piece of scrim hanging from the ceiling. It’s a hand-drawn re-animation of a video of George Balanchine’s choreography for Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments—in which a duet of dancers move erratically, supposedly in synch with the twelve-tone composition—while rotoscoped cartoon figures emerge at varying speeds. On the neighboring video projection, processed images of Gottfried von Bismarck are overlaid with hand-drawn passages from the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. His poems are a starting point at the front of the gallery as well, where engravings dissolve into abstract notation on top of a series of aluminum sculptures that are contoured as though they've been set to music. They are sculptures of compositions that were poems written for a dance.
Anton Webern spent decades deconstructing music theory before encountering the problem: with such a detached form of music, where do you begin? He based a series of compositions off the poems of Trakl, who had spent the final years of his life serving as a nurse for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI, an experience that confirmed the civilizational decline that he had fantasized about his entire life. Trakl translated this decline with decadence, which Webern then filtered through the discipline of his music. Musicologists frequently say that you can see mountains in his scores. In 1914, Trakl died of a medical cocaine overdose, while Webern was killed by a nervous American soldier two weeks after the end of WWII.
Trakl’s poetry is so emo that it’s almost funny. His scenes are filled with orphans and death; Decaying in a bush of thorns. He was obsessed with humanity’s seemingly incurable madness, and the idea that it was a daemon that ran through history and people. Madness itself was a shared form. He saw it in poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, who had an intense influence on Trakl’s poetry, and had spent half of his life living isolated in a tower due to insanity. But Hölderlin thought that our lives were too ridiculous to be purely tragic. He thought the comedic form was the most applicable to our experience. In 1803, three years before Hölderlin was interned in a sanitarium and subsequently released into the care of a carpenter in Tübingen, he published Remarks on Oedipus in which he viewed certain myths through a decidedly comic, not tragic, light. He wrote, “Thus, man forgets himself and God turns, but in a sacred way, like a traitor.” Patrick McGraw
In the back of the gallery the animation, A Light That Dies in My Mouth, plays against a piece of scrim hanging from the ceiling. It’s a hand-drawn re-animation of a video of George Balanchine’s choreography for Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments—in which a duet of dancers move erratically, supposedly in synch with the twelve-tone composition—while rotoscoped cartoon figures emerge at varying speeds. On the neighboring video projection, processed images of Gottfried von Bismarck are overlaid with hand-drawn passages from the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. His poems are a starting point at the front of the gallery as well, where engravings dissolve into abstract notation on top of a series of aluminum sculptures that are contoured as though they've been set to music. They are sculptures of compositions that were poems written for a dance.
Anton Webern spent decades deconstructing music theory before encountering the problem: with such a detached form of music, where do you begin? He based a series of compositions off the poems of Trakl, who had spent the final years of his life serving as a nurse for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during WWI, an experience that confirmed the civilizational decline that he had fantasized about his entire life. Trakl translated this decline with decadence, which Webern then filtered through the discipline of his music. Musicologists frequently say that you can see mountains in his scores. In 1914, Trakl died of a medical cocaine overdose, while Webern was killed by a nervous American soldier two weeks after the end of WWII.
Trakl’s poetry is so emo that it’s almost funny. His scenes are filled with orphans and death; Decaying in a bush of thorns. He was obsessed with humanity’s seemingly incurable madness, and the idea that it was a daemon that ran through history and people. Madness itself was a shared form. He saw it in poets such as Friedrich Hölderlin, who had an intense influence on Trakl’s poetry, and had spent half of his life living isolated in a tower due to insanity. But Hölderlin thought that our lives were too ridiculous to be purely tragic. He thought the comedic form was the most applicable to our experience. In 1803, three years before Hölderlin was interned in a sanitarium and subsequently released into the care of a carpenter in Tübingen, he published Remarks on Oedipus in which he viewed certain myths through a decidedly comic, not tragic, light. He wrote, “Thus, man forgets himself and God turns, but in a sacred way, like a traitor.” Patrick McGraw
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ECHOES OF MISHIMA
Go Mishima
Sadao Hasegawa
Tamotsu Yato
Through November 4th, 2023
Through November 4th, 2023
G A L E R I E P E P E
Language fails. Deleuze says, summarizing Spinoza, “the only question that we don’t even know [savons] what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don’t know what a body can do.” After an early life devoted to the word, Yukio Mishima turned to the body, to discover what a body was capable of, as an actor, as a body builder. An actor instrumentalizes the body, in service to language sometimes, but really gestures toward something more. A body builder counts - reps, sets, weights - to break the body in order to strengthen it, to gesture towards something more. The fetish, per Freud, emerges when a desiring subject fails to reconcile reproductive impulses, replacing the object of desire with a symbol. The fetish becomes not merely a substitute for the phallus, but something more. The “healthy” drive towards procreation, towards life, becomes an erotic impulse towards death. The image, the symbol, the gesture, the body, confront the limitations of language. The body, of course, also fails. The gesture remains. Violence, like eroticism, does not speak. When Mishima spoke to the soldiers at the military base before his ritual suicide, they couldn’t hear him.
“I cherished a romantic impulse toward death. . . . It remained for me some day to achieve something, to destroy something. That was where the steel came in. . . . The goal of my life was to acquire all the various attributes of the warrior. . . . Body and spirit had never blended. . . . Somewhere, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them. That principle, it occurred to me, was death.” Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel
Dasha Nekrasova
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present Echoes of Mishima a three-person exhibition of Japanese artists Go Mishima, Sadao Hasegawa and Tamotsu Yato. September 21st - November 4th, 2023
Galerie Pepe is pleased to present Echoes of Mishima a three-person exhibition of Japanese artists Go Mishima, Sadao Hasegawa and Tamotsu Yato. September 21st - November 4th, 2023
Amsterdam 123 B, Col. Hipódromo Condesa
Mexico City, Mexico 06100