FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
UNIT 1 presents:
7:00pm-10:00pm February 15th, 2014
Musical Performances 10:00pm- 1:00am
Lake Worth
exhibition space UNIT 1 is pleased to
announce a solo exhibition by Juan Doncel to be followed by an
album release party and performances by The
Sunny Devilles and The Astrea
Corporation. Astrea Corporation’s set will be filmed for release as a UNIT1 sessions video.
In
his first solo exhibition, young Columbian-American painter Juan Doncel offers
us an aspirational dream bristling with seductive color and swaggering bravado.
Using vinyl stencils created with a custom built machine, Doncel’s paintings
share a rudimentary aesthetic with stencil-based street art and graf- (Banksy, C125, and FinDaC) but because each painting
is formed by the gradual accretion of obsessive layers of paint and vinyl, they
shimmer with a quality that is best appreciated indoors and with good
lighting-which truth be told, is where the money is.
Speaking
of Money (the American kind), Doncel begins his trifecta with 3 large paintings
inspired by the $100 bill in full color. I cannot imagine a better way to spend
money than to buy a painting of it, and I’m sure Andy Warhol would agree. Plus,
everyone knows that once you get the Money….well then you get the Women (except
Warhol because he was gay)- and so it is only appropriate that Doncel has
painted them as well. Six ravishing beauties to be exact- resplendent in full
Indian Headdress lounging in the shadow of Mount Fuji (naturally).The sequence
logically rounds out with a triptych featuring characters from Tarantino’s
“Pulp Fiction”- which in many ways is the ultimate movie about Money and to a lesser extent Women, but also
really a movie about Fiction.
I
think about Rococo paintings by Watteau or Fragonard when I think of my former
student-now full grown artist-Juan Doncel. It's like the idle rich with their
fluffy cotton candy clouds and flying babies have been replaced with call girls
and well dressed gangsters on a mission to stack up those Benjamins. The thing shared
is a reluctant subtext that acknowledges the tenuous fiction of a life lived in
excess-it’s fleeting nature and empty glamour. This existential shadow lingers
in the background of the work, but Doncel, like Tony Montana-is going for
broke. With enough ingenuity and hustle, “The World is Yours”-and it’s in a gangster
spirit that Doncel plays his game. I would buy all these paintings if I lived
in a Miami penthouse and was dating coked out models and needed some art for my
orgy room. But none of those things are applicable to me, which is why we are
putting them up for sale here at UNIT1.
After
I drop the work off, can I hang out a little?
Director
UNIT1 exhibitions
Please join us after the opening reception for “In
Search Of…” an album release party by The Sunny Devilles, and a
performance by The
Astrea Corporation which will be filmed for a UNIT1 session video.
UNIT 1 is
an exhibition space and independent media production company founded by Jacques
de Beaufort. The gallery showcases artists in all media working in challenging
forms that exist somewhere near the EDGE or beyond it. The space also
hosts special events, film screenings, performances, and happenings driven by
UNIT 1 participants and friends.
The gallery is open only during events and by appointment.
For more information visit www.unit1.org and like Unit 1 on
Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/unit1projects.
213-255-0730
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