This exhibition of new paintings presents the first instalment of an ongoing project, a restaging of Richard Wagner’s epic cycle of music-dramas, Der Ring des Nibelungen, in selected parts. Responding to the dramatic-musical text in a purely pictorial form, this collection of paintings represents a comprehensive re-imagining, in which most key symbols are visible but nothing else is business as usual.
The artist says: “The exhibition’s title refers to the character who is arguably the protagonist of the cycle, Wotan, the head of the old gods. Following a line of thought that reads the narrative as an allegory of broader social evolution, Wotan represents the personified force of humanity’s collective, historical transcendental impulse, and specifically acting as an agent of authority stemming from transcendental ideals (the law). It is in their relation to this principle that all the other figures in the narrative are defined. The story of the Ring cycle follows a trajectory of increasing dissolution brought about by a primordial fracture of innocence that has caused truth to become incommensurable with virtue and love, ending with a total collapse of the world and the beginning of a new order. Although it was conceived a century-and-a-half ago, it draws from ancient sources, and the excellence of Wagner’s synthesis is that it remains relevant and apt for reinterpretation in every age.” Samuel Quinteros graduated with honours from Sydney College of the Arts in 2013. He was selected for Hatched 2013, the annual exhibition of work by the best of the country’s art school graduates, at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, and in 2014 he exhibited in the Australia Platform at Art Stage Singapore, curated by Aaron Seeto. Quinteros is currently undertaking a year-long artist residency at Curwoods Lawyers in the Sydney CBD. Wotan, erwache! (Wotan, awake!) is his first solo exhibition at Galerie pompom.
Wotan, erwache! Samuel Quinteros Till July 20, 2014 Also showing at Galerie pompom in July is an exhibition of new paintings by Miles Hall. “What I’m looking for is an experience of colour and space that is inherently pictorial but at the same time something that can be physically encountered as surface,” Hall says. Applied predominantly with his hands, Hall employs the use of pure pigments mixed with beeswax and linseed oil. “These paintings are not the result of an intellectualised program or criteria; instead the images develop of their own accord following both the visual and tactile possibilities of the medium.”
