headandhandinhand

FL Gallery opens its new space on Viale Sabotino with a solo exhibition by Franklin Evans (b.1967, Reno).

In headandhandinhand the artist will present a new series of paintings and an installation that follows the line of his recent institutional exhibition that were held at the Nevada Museum of Art (2013) and the Montserrat Gallery at the Montserrat College of Art (2014). Evans defines these works as “installative environments” that become “experiential environments for the public” showing the process of reflection and the work of the artist through a presentation of his own studio in the gallery space.

The title chosen for this exhibition refers to the fact that Evans’ painting is a complex mental process and at the same time the finish is totally manual, unlike some other works in which he includes different types of digital prints.
However, many of the images on which Evans works were found on the web: the artist repeats in a certain sense a kind of amplified grid pixels, and in each of them he reproduces a detail of heads or hands belonging to a canonical work of the history of Western art, very often known by heart. On display there is, for example, the painting handsjockjudd (2014) that alludes through amplified details, within the “pixels”, not only to well-known painters of the modern European tradition such as Henri Matisse (the hands) or Piet Mondrian (the grid), but also to the American tradition as thee explicit citation of Donald Judd.
Franklin Evans’ work continues to evolve expanding both the scope of its research and the instruments used to carry it out -for example, through the use of technology and networks- without ever forgetting the importance for his practice of materiality and the possibilities of painting itself.