All The Splendor Has Departed

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present All The Splendor Has Departed, a project space exhibition that explores space and time through an architectural mise-en-scène, with paintings by Quentin James McCaffrey and sculptures by Ugo Rondinone. Reclaimed building materials—antique wall trim, wainscoting, and a salvaged mantle— adorn the gallery walls in incomplete configurations, suggesting a forsaken interior. Alluding to a sort of ghost architecture, these elements set an ethereal stage for the modest and somewhat surreal works presented.

Quentin James McCaffrey’s carefully rendered paintings depict interior rooms and halls devoid of figures yet teeming with traces of life. Potted plants, miniature granite busts, mantels, convex mirrors, and gilt-framed paintings stand in for missing personages, conjuring histories collected within walls decorated with wallpapers and lined with trim. McCaffrey’s work explores the domestic interior as a spatial palimpsest, a place where memory itself sediments. Here it may seem that time stands still, though delicately rendered sunbeams streaking through out of frame windows also mark a specific moment in time.

Accompanying McCaffrey’s paintings, five candles by Ugo Rondinone rest on the gallery floor. Painted in bright hues of moss green, neon orange, soft pink, royal blue, and white, the dripping, life-like forms derive from Rondinone’s 2013 series still.life. in which the artist cast quotidian objects like stones, bread, chairs, fruit, and candles. Small and seemingly ordinary, the candles convey an earnest and weighty existence: cast in bronze and then filled with lead, the dense sculptures lock firmly on the floor as invisible flames drip wax down the candles’ lengths, pooling around their edges.

Quentin James McCaffrey received a BA from Taylor University in Upland, IN (2009) and an MFA from The New York Academy of Art (2011). He attended The Macedonia Institute Residency in 2022 and is a two time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2020, 2022). He has shown work at Ochi Projects (CA), Moskowitz Bayse (CA), Hesse Flatow Gallery (NY), Marlborough Gallery (NY), Winter Street Gallery (MA), 1969 Gallery (NY), Trestle Gallery (NY), Flowers Gallery (NY), and The University of Maryland Eastern Shore (MD). McCaffrey lives and works in New York.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Switzerland. He studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna before moving to New York in 1997, where he lives and works to this day. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2006) Art Institute of Chicago (2013); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2014) Palais de Tokyo, 2015, Secession, Vienna 2015, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam 2016, MACRO, Rome 2016, Carre D’Art, Nimes 2016, Berkley Art Museum, Berkeley, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati 2017, Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Belvedere, Vienna (2021) Tamayo Museum, Mexico City (2022 ) and Schirn and Staedel Museum, Frankfurt (2022) In 2007 he represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Forthcoming exhibitions include The Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Museum of Art and History), Geneva, Switzerland, The Städel Museum, Frankfurt and The Phillips Collection, Washington.