Broadway Gallery NYC

François Geffray
Andy Wilhelm
Maria Malo-Molina

François Geffray

François Geffray
December 16th - 31st, 2009, opening Friday, December 18th, 6 to 8pm.

Curated by Tchera Niyego

In his art François Geffray transforms painterly movements into something tangible, something intriguingly fluid on canvas, upon seeing which viewers can’t help the desire to touch and feel. His works are intuitive and vibrant, composed of shapes and lines that are free-spiritedly manipulated to form a world of fanciful naïveté yet his portrayal of humans and objects echo Classicism, while exuding warm, ominous, or eccentric atmosphere. The work is vivid and refreshing, creating an otherworldly atmosphere where nature comes to life on canvas and invites viewers for a walk in Geffray’s world. French artist Geffray is no stranger to new challenges. With an extensive array of mediums from digital art to painting, his body of work is vast and varied.

Geffray’s visual interpretations are deceptively child-like, minimalist and captivating works, which he creates through detailed ink, acrylic and oil paint, and also in his use of bold, vibrant, colors. His paintings are a kind of electrified impressionism; with a palette of bright hues Geffray captures light and movement with an unusual forcefulness. Manipulating linear and geometric shapes, Geffray creates imagery that is at once surreal and rooted in an affinity to reality.

Geffray’s artwork takes a psychological perspective of the “other.” Drawing on images from day-to-day life Geffray’s work highlights both the highs and lows, contrasts and similarities between human relationships by producing morphed images that combine literal representation with metaphor.

Andy Wilhelm

Andy Wilhelm
December 16th - 31st, 2009, opening Friday, December 18th, 6 to 8pm.

Andy Wilhelm’s sculptures are made out of wood, bronze, gypsum cement, Styrofoam and glue. The objects are made up of a diverse collection of forms: some fundamental, like spheres, and others vaguely figurative, and yet others resembling tools. All have been rendered in a manner that reveals a time consuming practice. The process of making communicates a need to create a structure to explore the limits of material, and it’s ability to anchor ideas to the present time and place. Within this formal structure there is allusion to objects and potential phenomenon that exist on a much different scale than the one the viewer and the object currently occupies.

Clamp Ball, 2009, is made entirely out of many wooden hand-screw clamps, clamped to themselves in a frenetic jumble. The clamps vary in size, and are organized in a pattern of descending scale. The smallest elements on the fringe are dwarfed by the larges clamps positioned in the center of the arrangement. The entire volume looks like a dense ball of frenzied matter, with subtle variations in color, alluding to some imagined particle or cluster.

The cast bronze sculpture Untitled(Octomom), 2009, seems to sprightly balance on top of its steel stand. Conjoined spheres appear to have arranged themselves along electrically charged polar axes.

Untitled(Pick A Hole and Stick With It), 2009, is a hollowed out shell made of thin cast gypsum cement that hovers in space. It has a ghostly figurative presence, that is at once a curving, sensual form, but also skeletal and drained of life.

Untitled, 2006, is undulating spiral of wood shavings and glue that seem to have grown by accretion around an ordinary ballpoint pen.

Maria Malo-Molina

Maria Malo-Molina
December 16th - 31st, 2009, opening Friday, December 18th, 2009, 6 - 8 pm.

Maria Malo-Molina was born in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba and raised in the United States. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Photography in 2006, from the Ringling School of Art and Design. While attending Ringling School of Art she was awarded a space for a semester in both Parsons in 2005 and Lamar Dodd School of Art in Cortona Italy to focus on her independent studio practice. She has traveled to various countries and is continuously fascinated with cultures of which she draws inspiration from.

Her work ranges from painting, photography, installation, sculpture and performance. Mixed media has always been an important part of her work.

In her current works, Malo-Molina collects clippings from photographs and printouts from various road trips and other travels including the place she resides, New York City. She then reassembles and constructs images of city escapes, urban streets and collossal buildings. After embedding the materials to the panel, the surface of the painting is worked slowly with glazes, transparent at times, which cover and expose parts of the fabricated image. This process allows her to focus on creating environments that evoke emotion, mood and individuality for the collaged images. Her expansive palette reflects beautifully in her paintings that maintain hefty color variations and subtle tonal shifts. She states: ‘I am interested in fabricating saturated and rich land masses, escapes of rooftop views and panoramas similarly to how the memory would. It is mostly filled with drama and emotion.’

Malo-Molina has been exhibited in Pulse Contemporary Art Fair (Miami), NYSP Gallery (New York City), Selby Gallery (Sarasota, Florida), Crossley Gallery (Sarasota, Florida), City Museum of Washington D.C and AR Contemporary Gallery in Milan, Italy.

You can see her work online at http://mmalomolina.carbonmade.com