Deconstructing our world Home page

Red Carriage Commons Gallery

3358 Route 16, White Mountain Highway,
North Conway, New Hampshire

February 15th to April 30th 2015

Open every day from 8:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Info: 603-356-6068

Themes featured in the exhibition:

Buildings

Things

Human body

Color

Technical background

Read about the techniques used in the creation of the various visual themes in this exhibition.

The new exhibition by rergam, “Deconstructing our World”, has been called a feast of colors by critics and aptly so, as striking colors are at the base of these creations.

The underlying philosophical base for this series is the mutating nature of the perception by the mind of our world, well reflected in the ancient view that the truth is not apparent and what is apparent is not the truth. This is just as valid in the physical world as it is when it comes to emotions. This concept can be extended almost infinitely, for instance a bottle is mainly sand but sand was a rock and the rock was lava and so on. Our perception of things is nothing more than the interpretation by our minds of a thing or combination of things, achieved either by natural causes or man-made manipulations. In the 18th century the chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier affirmed that “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”. Furthermore, perception is also an interpretation, as René Magritte managed to convey in his now very famous painting of an object that looks like a pipe. He inserted text in that painting that reads, “This is not a pipe”. The viewer is contemplating a drawing that looks like a pipe but the painting itself is not a pipe.

rergam borrowed a concept from gastronomy to summarize this philosophy in current language and thus to name his work in this area and this exhibition. Chefs often use the term 'deconstruction' to indicate they have reinterpreted, transformed, a classic or traditional dish using mainly the same ingredients in different proportions and/or using new cooking techniques. The 30 works of art presented, are deconstructions of objects, buildings, the human body or even color itself.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles designed by architect Frank Gehry posed an interesting opportunity for this style of art.

rergam photographed this architectural masterpiece and manipulated color and perspective to create a new vision as seen in Palm Tree and Valley.

Bottleflies uses a similar approach using an everyday object as a subject: wine bottles of different styles and tonalities. By colorizing, multiplying and manipulating their shapes a totally different perception is achieved, giving the viewer the feeling of looking at butterflies.

In Mangos a mirror was used to multiply a photograph of arms and legs, which were then tightly cropped and colorized. The skin imperfections have a striking resemblance to that of a mango’s peel.

Aquarius and Horses are somewhat the reverse of the techniques explained above. They are the result of a reconstruction, or better said, a construction of an ultimate artistic perception by using a cinetique technique or, more generally, creating an illusion in an OpART technique. In this case the work starts by creating original colored line templates and marrying/fusing these with real world objects, including at times photographs, then obtaining a photographic interpretation of a newly created subject.

Home page