Exhibition Dates: January 5 – February 16, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 5 from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 434 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Build Your Cities, an exhibition of paintings by Nicole Charbonnet. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger@434, located at 434 Julia Street, from January 5 through February 16, 2013. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, January 5 from 6–8 pm.
Deer, 2012. Acrylic, plaster and paper on canvas. 72 x 60 inches
Nicole Charbonnet has taken the title of her exhibition, “Build Your Cities,” from a quotation by Nietzsche:
The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! … Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
For Nicole Charbonnet, just as history is the written experience of the debris of the past, art is the visual manifestation of that experience. Her work is about memory and her creative process is analogous to the way our minds retain ideas, feelings and images. Paintings are built up with layers of literal debris from the artist’s life including letters, receipts, books, and fabric. Appropriated images, described by the artist as “rescued fragments and artifacts of the omnipresent cultural world” are incorporated. They include film stills, cartoon characters, superheroes and iconic photographs. There are also images from important works by noteworthy artists like Picasso, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Louise Bourgeois and Damien Hirst. The surfaces of the paintings are cut, sanded and scraped to reveal a palimpsestic “memory” of preexisting stages. The images, distressed by the attempt at erasing them, stand like architectural ruins from the past – impotent in function but potent in meaning. The artist states, “Both form and content in my work are a commentary on not just epic themes of humanity and mortality, but a more Freudian statement about perception, desire, community, the illusion of originality and the anxiety of influence.”
Born in New Orleans, Nicole Charbonnet received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A. from Boston University. She also studied in France at the Academic Goetz in Paris and the Cleveland Institute of Art’s school in Lacoste. She has received numerous honors and awards including grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Elizabeth Greenshields and Art Matters Foundations. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Painting at Tulane University.