Beyond a frame

About

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce 'Beyond a frame', of Alessandro Roma and Gabriel Esteban Molina.  The exhibition sheds light on various ways the contemporary artists use a scope of media in presenting images.  

Alessandro Roma and Gabriel Esteban Molina may seem to embody antipodes with regard to their artistic practice at first glimpse, the first being a painter trained in the tradition of Italian art school that goes back centuries, and the other a Canadian multimedia artist with focus on moving image and experimental art forms.  In contemplating the works of these artists, however, a common and possibly a vital trait across their practice may strike, which is the essential role of the image and how the image serves as vehicles of thoughts, ideas or concepts.

The works in the exhibition use various media, including hand painted books, wood frame screen, textile paintings, and video works, none of which is traditional painting or photography that is rectangular and neatly framed.  For each work the media is an integral part as to how the image is presented, and how it is viewed and perceived. 

Alessandro Roma is quintessentially a painter, and while his practice increasingly involves three dimensional works including ceramic sculptures and installations, they are primarily informed by his practice of painting, and image constitutes the heart of his body of work regardless of media.

In the middle of the ground floor is the latest series of entirely hand-painted artist books, the testimony of the Roma's acute and almost fragile sensibilities and boundless creativity, featuring pages of not only paintings and drawings, but of collages of innumerable textiles, prints, found photos, complete with elaborate covers sometimes with unexpected material such as ceramic panels.  Overlooking the precious books are three-panel, recto-verso screens, and textile paintings.  The screen has particular significance for the show not only for its commanding presence with outstanding colours - the irregular shape wood frames are flame red -  and Roma's signature abstract flora landscape, but it is a functional object; does a meaning of image shift when it is used as a piece of utilitarian object?  

Gabriel Esteban Molina works with photography and moving image.  He submits new ways of perceiving the world, by creating visual that hover between reality and perceived reality, or analogue and digital, and how they interact and create layers of perception.  In his work images are often presented after multiple interventions, resulting in complex layers of meanings.  Encompassing the conceptual construct of his practice is one constant, which is a painterly visual and the resulting importance of image, possibly owing to his early training in drawing and painting.