Cabinet in the Mirror

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition using Bruno Goller’s Cabinet in the Mirror as a point of derivation. Investigating aspects of Modernism that lie somewhere between Art Nouveau, Expressionism and Surrealism, the exhibition foregrounds works that both obscure and transform standard modes of representation in interior and exterior spaces, through experimentation with form, perspective, and depth of field.

With a distinct sensitivity to facture and pictorial space, Alistair Frost recasts simple, geometric shapes as architectural motifs (windows, curtains, doors, rooftops) to create canvases that yield no definable vanishing point. Favoring more flattened volumes and depths of field, Frost arranges and repurposes fragments of information sparsely around the picture plane, while maintaining an overall gestalt of completed building facades, floorplans or schematics.

Creating both interior and exterior dysmorphic spaces, Magalie Guérin’s territories employ a densely layered set of Surrealist strategies. At once psychological and metaphorical, her dense canvases shift between representation and abstraction and back again. Using self imposed restrictions (repeated motifs, grooved surfaces) as part of her process, Guérin plays with the capacities of recasted forms within the context of her authentic narratives.

John McAllister registers traces of a former three-dimensionality through his flat graphic elements and use of motifs. Presenting a Japanese folding screen in the exhibition, McAllister invites us to experience a work whose function is expressed equally as a distinct painterly composition and an architectural and functional form.

Outlines and shadowless shapes morph together in Mads Westrup’s paintings to yield a certain pictorial alchemy reminiscent of the sublime and metaphysical. Moving freely between thin and transparent layers and thick and opaque textures, Westrup’s experiments with color, pattern and material interventions prescribe a sense of tension to the work, shifting them toward a more disorienting, relatively enigmatic, in-between space.