STORIES FROM THE WONDERLAND - CHAPTER 1: Dorothy Circus Rome | Group Show

 

Featuring: Jonathan Viner, Nathan Spoor, Sarah Joncas, Sergio Mora, J. T. Pannacciò, Andy Fluon & Aaron Jasinsky.

 

On Friday, October 12th at 7pm Dorothy Circus Gallery will open its doors with the exhibition “Stories From The Wonderland”.

Dorothy Circus Gallery is a new space in Rome dedicated to “Lowbrow” and “Pop Surrealism”, two of the most controversial, vital and exciting movements of contemporary art. The gallery, conceived by Alexandra Mazzanti and Jonathan Pannacciò, is situated near a classic Roman aqueduct providing the perfect backdrop for the surreal-chic interior of the gallery’s space. A black wooden floor and ceiling frame the white walls.

Sculptures protrude from neo-Gothic arches contrasting with the ironic pink and colored of the Art and the Bookshop. These aesthetic games provoke and excite the eye by using the same weapons of these inspirational art trends.

Dorothy Circus Gallery is an encounter between classical criteria and the will to experiment, the gateway for those who want to discover the fascinating artistic trends born out of late 60’s Los Angeles scene.
The audience will enjoy the work of American and European artists, including Italian artists who will show their art in our exhibitions and events. The first show, “Stories From The Wonderland” Chapter 1, opens on October 12th and will run until November 16th. It will include work by J. Viner, Nathan Spoor, J.T. Pannacciò, Sarah Joncas, Sergio Mora, Andy Fluon and Aaron Jasinski. The next show, “Stories From The Wonderland” Chapter 2, will open on November 30th and will continue until January 6th, 2008. It will include works by Kathie Olivas, Tim McCormick, Damon Soule, Andrea Ambrogio, Ahren Hertel, Nicoletta Ceccoli and Josh Clay.

“Lowbrow” and “Pop Surrealism” are born from an unusual alchemical fusion, a multicultural mix in which memories of childhood games blend with aspects of noir carnival, reinventing an ectoplasmic reality that reflects the complications of everyday life. The confusing and hallucinatory psychic automatisms of the surrealist movement are now mixed with American hot rod culture, underground comics and punk music, creating a perfect chaos where absolute iconographic anarchy reigns. Pin-up ladies from the 50s smile at a gothic Alice, the rivals of Lolitas dancing softly to the songs of the Pixies and Cure. Scenarios inspired by Hieronymus Bosch are filled with strange animals, clumsy figures and comical demons.

 

A paradoxical atmosphere with weird presences that reminds us of a David Lynch film, a multicultural melting pot: street culture, pure pop, bizarre illustration, manga culture, and tattoo art. It is everything that comes from videogames, indie music and sci-fi all the way to strange multicolored skulls celebrating the Mexican holiday “Dia de los Muertos”.
“Lowbrow” is the opposite of “Highbrow”, an American term evoking high literature, music, cinematography and art. Robert Williams, American cartoonist and founder of lowbrow culture magazine “Juxtapoz”, created this neologism at the end of 1970. It is a new language that transmits the power of a movement born from the slums struggling against a cultural system in decay. “Lowbrow” does not mean low profile but great artistic and cultural impact. In the last few years the visual wonders of great artists like Mark Ryden, Todd Schoor, Jeff Soto, Joe Sorren, Shepard Fairey, Tim Biskup and the literary support from manifestos like Weirdo Deluxe by Matt Dukes Jordan and Pop Surrealism: The Rise Of Underground Art by Robert Williams, Carl McCormick, Larry Reid and Kirsten Anderson, helped “Lowbrow” gain a strong position in the world of contemporary art.

 

Dorothy Circus is not only an art gallery but also a place where art lovers and collectors will find a fresh and different choice of new and renowned international artists. A real multicultural space that offers a series of highly selective exhibits of the most valued artists in the international art scene mixed with a selection of young and promising artists.

An exhibition project. Two chapters. The same vision of the imaginary flux.
Fourteen artists lead the “challenging”-looking direction.
Dorothy Circus Gallery and Gianluca Marziani lead concepts and aesthetic crossings for the first time exhibited in a brand new exhibition space. We are in Rome, with a new generation concept-gallery that brings on clear ideas and a clear identity: to investigate specific linguistic territories, which can be oriented between Pop Surrealism and lowbrow art, between extreme figurations and independent pictorial realities. Alexandra Mazzanti and Jonathan Pannacciò keep the threads of the Gallery – two complementary souls that created this project with its thematic and curatorial sophistication. An international and antagonistic eye that will pass through the continents, following a fil rouge that represents a new and cruel beauty.

It begins with “Stories From The Wonderland”: multiple visions inside universes in which every artist finds his/her elective geography. Atmospheres, styles, the emotional and the psychoanalytic tensions change. What does not change is the artists’ will to tell us about parallel realities, different territories that belong to surrealist entities that dive into people’s minds. The external world thus becomes an impervious and unpredictable place, at the same time attractive and repulsive, a mixture of cruelty and sublime, normality and absurdity, tenderness and roughness. Day and night penetrate in each other, creating a fusion of sentiments and attitudes. Here, everything owns its double and goes even beyond that; it recalls the reality with its own rules, which are recognizable. In wonderland, appearances deceive and deceits become more important than appearances…

Wonderland becomes like the ideal place where ancestral fears, dreamlike travels, childhood archetypes, and ambitions are metabolized. Like the welcome territory for those who re-read history, daily events, small and big social dramas. Like a place beyond geography where the individual and society are fused in the moral visions of an emotional art, which is both classic and desecrating, thoughtful in its technique and its solutions, beyond the limiting bond of genres.
“Stories From The Wonderland” represents a complex insertion in a painting that mirrors the most contaminated spirit of our times; various figurative hypothesis that demonstrate its visionary character and its more plausible realism. Landscapes, bodies, animals, stories, nature, objects: the world is measured through the metabolic style of the artists, everything looks similar to reality, but still you perceive suspended atmospheres, a sense of spasmodic and silent wait, of doubt and danger, of a-normal silences or strange noises approaching.

These are the artists for the first chapter: Jonathan Viner, Sarah Joncas, Aaron Jasinski, Sergio Mora, Andy Fluon, Jonathan Panacciò, and Nathan Spoor. Jonathan Viner sees the world with a dark and noir narrative, showing us recognizable but uncommon places, just beyond ordinary life. We find shy ladies with pale skin, fragile and shy bodies, closed eyes, and boys that look like urban martyrs. There is, in each painting, a conscious shyness, the fear of the unknown, the will to talk with one’s friendly ghosts. Viner’s humanity looks at the cruel theatre of our reality with a severe virtue; an atmosphere at low voltage in which you feel an internal pulsation, the battle beneath the skin, the fires between heart and soul. A little modern world behind the corner of reality. A paranoid rush where the impossible becomes history.
Sarah Joncas invents girls that acquire on their bodies the identity of the exterior world, becoming prosthesis and completion of reality, camouflaging through their pure being. Thoughtful sirens, elegant suicide girls…we look at the silent celebration of a femininity that feels the metaphysical call of natural purity and looks for the mind space inside the ambiguous forms of the city. These are fascinating women, independent and owning no usual feminine canon. On the contrary, they remind the characters of certain post-urban novels like James G. Ballard’s: silent but cruel beneath the elegant surface of their calm appearance.

Aaron Jasinski bewitches us with his poetic realism in which ambiguities, drifts, and possible excesses are hidden. It is hard to define Jasinski within a precise genre, a little bit like it happened with the best protagonists of a pop surrealism free from boundaries and from brave juxtapositions. Children and boys are at the center of the scenes. They raise the tension for a freedom conquered through game, a bloodless battle, an attack made just for fun. Everything is enlivened around their contagious energy, until animals, robots, toys and birds become preys to an unexpected collective acceleration. Those boys in action emanate the right energy but are alone, to remind us the value of playing in a works of dangerous appearances (adults) and gentle apparitions (children and other sons of instinct).
Sergio Mora mixes fable, circus culture, eroticism, news and popular mythologies, re-creating a world that metabolizes the iconographic lesson of Mark Ryden in a more Mediterranean version. There are various symbolic elements (the egg, the rabbit ears, the rose, the eye, the skeleton) that look like archetypes belonging to a Pixar-like surrealism, ironic in its vocation but tough in its moral; a “political” look that demonstrates the sacred cleanness of a beautiful painting, to provoke the many fears towards the children. Mora’s protagonists state the honest strength of children, the quality of their language, and the instinctive attitude of living with a panoramic gaze. After having understood the interior essence, the surreal oddities transform themselves into a parallel travel through the beauty of free gestures.

Andy Fluon, with a super-flat style and radically fluorescent colors, combines variable fragments, citations, cover icons, fetishes and other things belonging to his figurative imaginary. In harmony with the creative side of music, Andy’s painting creates a relationship between the light areas of his imaginary. He mixes the erotic bodies with the comic visions, the history of art with fables and burlesque, Warhol-like details with abstractions. A hyper-pop model that exaggerates in its acid tones, in its dissonances, in the chromatic conflict born from its harmonies. A play of American memories (Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann), but also of 60s and 70s graphic culture, of the television imaginary, of the 80s design between Memphis and Alchimia. A territory where color finds its contemporary essence.

Jonathan Pannacciò recreates enigmatic and visionary surfaces, a kind of pattern that pulses between figurative reality and abstract art. The matric is flat in its attitude and style, clear in its precise contours and in the determination of color. The result has an immediate artistic impact and a further semantic ambiguity. Pannacciò’s landscapes are chemic in his mind, a synthesis that gives a form to some ideas between their plastic and musical form. The forms have an inner pulsation, they seem to be moving like enlarged details of a micro-landscape. The organic landscape is transformed in a realistic and daily geography, confirming an unstoppable dynamism between brain and the external world.

Nathan Spoor elaborates enigmatic landscapes that create doubts about “what” we are seeing and “how” we look at the images. His wonderland takes radical position in its visionary skills and its narrative abstraction. The spaces look like Compton House’s gardens, where Peter Greenaway’s post-modern symbolism gets fused with surrealist inventions. This reminds us of Paul Delvaux and his aristocratic exteriors, or of an ordinary landscape where changes come from stranger bodies, curious visitors, signals of an event occurred outfield. Spoor takes us into a world of alien symbolisms and extraterrestrial metaphors, towards the enigmatic boundary between earthy memory and the vision of a far planet. His is a surreal galaxy that attracts us with his mysteries.