From the Press Release:
Lichtundfire is pleased to announce SONIC OPERA, an exhibition of new intimate-sized, abstract reductive paintings by New York based artist Christopher Stout. This marks the second Lichtundfire solo show by the artist, and also his sixth exhibition project with the gallery. Christopher Stout’s first solo exhibition at Lichtundfire was COME OUT 2 SHOW THEM in April of 2017.
As a metaphor of the words of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the French nobleman and ground-breaking scientist who was guillotined during the French Revolution due to his aristocratic background, who stated that, “…nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything transforms,” SONIC OPERA is both an expansion of, and a focused convergence on the work from his previous solo exhibition. Stout forms a vocabulary that is the result – in its original sense of res ultima (lat.) – of a synthesis of the visual disciplines of abstract reductive painting, abstract minimal sculpture and sound art composition.
Alike chords in music, or the floors of a building in architecture, the volume of a generative process of layering of materials provides the dialectic foundation for each work. All these works are serially congruent layered, with the exception of the top shape layer that bifurcates into porcelain circles or a parallelogram. With this approach, Stout, evokes a visual sense of a musical/ operatic monument – reality shrouded inside of a 5-sided plexiglass box.
In a discourse about the philosophy of sound, the German electronic composer, musical visionary, and theoretician Karlheinz Stockhausen clarified, that “…what is important is neither linearity or non-linearity, but the change, the degree of change from something that doesn’t move to other events with different tempos in particular.”
To that end, the artist remains steadfast in a constituency of replication, connection and reconnection, a mandate of restraint, negative space, aerial mapping, and Stout’s own tenet that, “subjective matter may be provided artifice through insertion into an established system.”
Conversely, the installation of these small size paintings hovers aesthetically and philosophically between the reductionist assumption that every thing, and every idea, can be reduced to its more simple and coherent form while emphasizing the imperfections which come with all things created.
Christopher Stout was born and raised in Maryland and lives and works in New York City. He is an abstract reductive artist whose work addresses and places itself between questions of “what is the construct of painting?” and “what is the construct of sculpture?” and is concerned with the additive outcome in merging the vocabularies of both disciplines. He lives in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan and works from his studio in the artist neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Christopher Stout is the founder and director Art During the Occupation Gallery in Bushwick, which is not affiliated with his personal art practice. ADO Gallery is a contemporary art gallery showing subversive and difficult work by New York City artists. It serves as a platform for discourse on work that challenges authority paradigms, feminist, queer, anti-establishment, hyper-aggressive, mystic, and/or joyously sexual, with a focus on performance and video artists as well as on contemporary sculpture and painting. He was the founder of Bushwick Art Crit Group (2013-2016), Bushwick NYC’s artist lecture and exhibition series, with a mission to foster an understanding of Contemporary Art through the lens of art and artists in Bushwick. Stout has received numerous public accolades for his work as an artist, Bushwick gallerist and curator.
Christopher Stout: Sonic Opera
May 11 - June 3, 2018
Opening Friday, May 11, 6 - 8 PM
Lichtundfire
175 Rivington
New York, NY 10002
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