Please join us this Friday from 7-9pm for the opening reception of "A Fine Line" with the artists Rob de Oude, Rodger Stevens and Rosa Valado.
The Front Room is proud to present new works by Rob de Oude,
Rodger Stevens and Rosa Valado. This exhibition explores the concept of
layering and repetition as a means of achieving a unified whole while exploring
the sum of its parts. Simple elements weave together to create tapestries of grand
design, with limitless functions available to each individual part. Through
repetition and meticulous placement, base materials like copper wire and
masking tape take on a greater form, creating visual stability while inviting
close visual scrutiny. Crisscrossing lines, concentric circles, and repeating
forms become their own miniature works, elemental to the final form yet
definitive in their own right.
Each of the artists in the exhibition use the texture of
overlapping linear forms to create a much larger whole. Rob de Oude makes
straight lines bend using a complicated and overlapping grid, while Rodger
Stevens bent linear sculptural works bring two dimensional linear forms to life
in his overwhelming room-sized installation, and Rosa Valado’s architectural
table-top configuration confounds and astounds with small, yet massive-seeming
wire and metal forms.
Rob de Oude’s paintings and drawings are composed of multitudes of meticulously
placed and repeated lines to reveal geometric shapes and patterns. The repeated
use of a single line displays the infinite possibilities of simple units
towards seeking an orchestrated balance in a grand design. De Oude’s rigorous
and meticulous painting process, layering and weaving matrices of straight
lines until, between the contrasting colors and crisscrossing patterns, grids
begin to bow and warp.
In
this exhibition Rodger Stevens’ installation of his linear
sculptures create is a space inhabited entities, sometimes recognizable, often
not, of shape and form—homages to often under appreciated things around him
they are like Egyptian hieroglyphs of our current times. Inside the space of
his installation one feels absorbed and confronted, overwhelmed, by not only
the objects around oneself but also by the shadows on the wall within this
dense forest of sinewy metal.
Rosa
Valado’s sculptures
are inspired by sacred geometry, physics, and nature. Using a range of metallic
light-reflecting materials, Rosa has been creating architectural forms that
interact with the viewer, often containing an interior space that one can
enter. Rosa is known for massive public sculptures that envelope the viewers.
In this exhibition the smaller table-top ratio draws oneself inside the
architectural installation, like a plan for an unworldly world’s fair
unrealized.