Cuts
Exhibition
-> Sep 21 2022
Morán Morán Gallery presents the exhibition Cuts by Eric N. Mack.
Morán Morán is pleased to announce Eric N. Mack’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Mexico City. This show, titled Cuts, presents a new body of work that reinvigorates the perceptions he so adeptly challenges regarding two and three dimensional work, as well as what constitutes a painting or a sculpture. For the exhibition, Mack created a half-dozen pieces at various scales, some that instigate the canvas versus stretcher relationship and others that relate to the structure of architecture. Cuts turns a few corners on his well-established practice, which continues to deliver visually and texturally provocative objects that also speak to formal aesthetics of color and form.
Mack’s paintings release from their supports to break off the picture plane, reaching out from the wall to spill onto the floor and cascade across the room. Here, with a series of stretched works, he provides a prequel to that material life so that the canvas remains on its stretcher but portions of the stretcher itself are visible. With one of the largest works in the show, which measures just over 10 feet tall, a rigid aluminum stretcher peeks out in a few areas, reflecting in the light, revealing its function, and contradicting the flexible skin of the composition it supports. On the surface, a beautifully intricate weave of fabrics, securely stitched together, combine into a spectral quilt that pulls taught to edges with orchestrated moments of swells and ruptures.
Stripes, florals, grids, and abstract shapes coalesce with a full palette of colors and materials that range from polyester to silk, in all stages of life from pristine to tattered. At times Mack’s compositions lean symmetrical and at a distance they could pass for aerial abstractions of a built environment, but the insistence is that of a gridded space – the geometry and repetition of a non-objective realm. However, through his selected media any non-figurative notion is disrupted by the inference of the body, of shelter, and of home.
Whereas the stretched works articulate a compression of installation, the loose and sweeping scaffoldless fabric works hint that some paintings have broken free. Patterned, plain, torn, and resewn, these soft assemblage pieces are composed of materials with a lifespan, which also carry a sense of place. One work, suspended in the gallery’s center space, unites various textiles; the most prominent section of the piece is an Italian filet lace tablecloth, replete with dancing putti, satyrs, and harps. The intricate design of this lace is executed with open needlework which appears more sheer because it hangs perpendicular to the floor. Reading like an oversized veil, the other side of this Italian heirloom discloses a composite of opaque fabrics – one is vibrantly striped, and one small red piece has white printed text that spells toom, or inverted: moot.
Throughout Mack’s show we find interjections of text, from printed logos, to embroidered letters, to tiny words barely legible on fabric tags. This language is given to the textiles and it is formatted within the compositions as concrete poems. With Cuts, Mack provides these subtle indications as he repeats material propositions, so that there is a rhythm to the exhibition and also a harmony contained within each work.
— Morán Morán