![Greg Murr - GRAVITATIONAL LENS [STUDY NO. 21], 2014](http://www.whiteconcepts.de/management/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Lens-detail_web.jpg)
DEENESH GHYCZY and GREG MURR – SPECTRAL
01 April 2014 – 15 April 2014
Opening: 04 April 2014, 7 – 9 PM
WHITECONCEPTS presents an exhibition of paintings about our reliance on vision as a means of understanding ourselves and our environment. Spectral, a two-person exhibition of paintings features the works of Deenesh Ghyczy (HU-GER) and Greg Murr (USA). In this show, both artists employ visual aberrations that address the limits of our perceptual capacities and draw connections between everyday phenomena and the unobservable frameworks that govern reality.
Sight is for most the dominant faculty among our five senses. Without vision, navigating quotidian life would require a notably altered approach.Yet for all our reliance upon it, our eyes are nevertheless a finite tool that manufactures a very particular experience of reality via a spectrum of light waves. What happens, then, when we probe vision’s boundaries to explore the distortions and threshold of this perceptual apparatus? And how can we engage our awareness of optical mechanics to explore comparatively intangible contexts such as the interior wonders of the human psyche or, outwardly, the physical laws of nature?
Deenesh Ghyczy uses traditional media to make paintings that would at first glance seem rooted in contemporary technology, given their multi-faceted and sometimes surreal appearance. Figurative subjects, attentively rendered in oil on linen, are fractured into multiple fragments that induce a sense of double- or triple-vision. What some might suspect a digitally based device is actually the diffraction of his subject through a simple prism. At once familiar, disorienting, and at moments haunting, Ghyczy’s rather conventional portraits are turned on their head, as it were, so that we can once more see the components that comprise a face without ever concisely establishing one’s identity. Like hearing a foreign language we can only hope to understand through its phonetic attributes, we’re challenged to look at Ghyczy’s images through the eyes of a child that studies the elements of line, shape, value and hue for the first time, not quite making sense of the whole.
The absence of the whole may initially be the most evident thread of continuity bridging these two artists. Through intentionally disarming studies of one particular peony blossom as viewed from multiple perspectives, Greg Murr similarly probes notions of incompleteness versus manifestation. Vacant holes of canvas replace portions of an otherwise highly rendered floral bloom. White spaces act as place-markers for something once present—now a specter of what had been. And the blossom itself, reiterated in four or five adjacent variations, makes a discrete reference to the cosmological phenomenon of gravitational lensing, (largely attributed to Einstein and his general theory of relativity), where the light of a distant galaxy is distorted and multiplied by the ‘lens’ of intense gravitational forces that stand between it and the observer. Whether with regard to the geometry of the universe, however, or the more earthly notion of the biological life-cycle itself, these meticulously painted perennials captivate with their intrinsic structure, rhythm and animus. Both artists encourage us to reflect upon the act of seeing, indulging us with visual harmony and a taste of the familiar, without fulfilling our expectations or offering full resolution.
Information about Deenesh Ghyczy
www.dghyczy.com
Information about Greg Murr
www.gregmurr.com
