Wyrds

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of the Spanish, Berlin-based artist, Laura Larraz.

For her first show, Larraz asks us to consider a cast of characters, which range from actual characters– the Madonna, the Venus, the putto or cherub, the dog, the cat, the wicked witch, etc– to painting, the western history thereof, “feminine beauty”, as both a static, codified entity and a protean, even monstrous figure, to power dynamics and the theater of life, as in fate or destiny, all of which are potentially and probably ultimately wicked. As such, the exhibition is, contrary to taboo, classically theatrical, recalling Shakespeare’s “weird witches” (the origin of the exhibition’s title) in Macbeth, the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, or even Luigi Pirendello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Their various connections, story lines, frictions and plots have yet to be written and await activation by a viewer. But to refer to them as passive would be a mistake. Rapidly painted with as much panache as fury, the constellation of protagonists and antagonists that populate Larraz’s tableaux seem to all but ridicule not only any attempt at being pinned down, but also conventions of figurative and abstract painting, good taste, and, perhaps, most importantly, beauty itself. Any beauty, traditional attractiveness, or optical allure that occurs in this work, happens almost in spite of it. One pictures these characters or better yet paintings not so much speaking as fulminating. That said, the object of their rage and protest is not necessarily a specific figure or tendency. There is a fundamental humanity and humanism at the heart of what and who they are. If anything, what binds and propels them has more to do with Pirendello’s aesthetic philosophy when he famously states, “Art takes revenge on life.”