Painting is Frozen Music
Curated by Jim Strong
Opening Reception: Friday, May 5, 2023 | 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Friday, May 5, 2023 – Sunday, June 11, 2023
Presented in Gallery One at Vox Populi
Featured Artists
Bambi Angel
Henry Bermudez
Pomona Za
Claes Gabriel
Daisy Diamond
Anne Minich
Anthony Campuzano
Drew Zimmerman
Jim Strong
About the Exhibition
’Painting is frozen music’ presents an intergenerational survey of Philadelphia based painters. Intentionally pairing artists at different stages of their careers who have maintained a connection to this infernal/beautiful place sometimes called Philadelphia and the infernal/beautiful practice sometimes called Painting. I am interested in this generational correspondence, because I have found that as a craft our practice is enriched by our knowledge of its history, and those we are in community with who have chosen painting as a way of life.
The show’s title borrows from and alters the defining romantic-era adage “Architecture is frozen music”. which beautifully illustrates the emerging poetics at this time which prioritized intuition, nature, altered states of perception and the yearning for a synthesis of the arts, philosophy and spirituality which would culminate in ideas like the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art.
But… Painting is funny. Though it may “aspire to the quality of music”, There is a virtue in the limitations of its analog-materiality, its place in time/space which undergird it as a practice. For artists working at the advent of the age of A.I. There is an oddness coupled with the air of being out of step laboring as we are in classical sensuousness, with our paint as flesh, painting life. I’m interested here in the humility of the medium, in the yearning for synthesis, transcendence but not its completion. To borrow yet another romantic phrase in the name of painting, we are after “a kind of poetry which is still in the state of becoming; that in fact is its real essence that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected.”
As a connoisseur, I want painting to be weird and announce its antiquated strangeness, its limitations, as an inherently futurist mode. An Alchemy which must begin in the world as much as it sets its course toward the unknown.