Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

The show will be on view from May 7 – June 5, 2021 and will present seven new drawings. To make these works, over twenty-five different drawings were created, then cut and systematically reassembled into their finished form. amanze is currently working with a newly reduced capsule of seven recurring elements that include: swimming pools, ada and audre - who masquerade as swimmers/divers, dancers and pseudo lovers - windows and other architectural references, okada [motorcycle taxis], pigeons in flight and the paper itself. amanze speaks lovingly of each of the elements as individual forms. Now having isolated them from their former cohort, they take on new meaning as the ones that stayed. Human-like beings and inanimate objects ultimately share the same function; flat forms that interact and move [play] in endless configurations to create a multi-dimensional and therefore, illogical space. amanze’s drawings are an illusion; a suggestion of an expansive unnamed world situated between nowhere and everywhere. Primarily using graphite, fluorescent inks and photo transfers, each layer of space within the drawing has, with calculation and spontaneity, been negotiated, constructed and ultimately invented. To build upon the layering of space within the drawing, amanze has begun to explore a process of creating a final work that consists of overlapping multiple sheets of paper. Taking this one step further and embracing the puzzle-like element of parts within a whole, the drawings In Thinghood come together towards the end of the process. amanze removed any semblance of knowing in advance what the works would be and opened an organic dialogue with the drawings about what they could become. With almost thirty separate units to compose with, there are virtually infinite possibilities to bend planes and disrupt logic.

The Blue that embraces me...highlights the silent essence that illuminates the memory of such things that, individually and intimately, bring us back to ourselves. These seminal landscapes seek to identify the contours of life, presenting a kind of tracing of the soul as the artist views his work as a spiritual language, a way to see life as a sacred experience of interrelations. The show marks a defining moment in the artists career as Lucena’s artistic production is moving toward a wider understanding of “limit” as a concept. The limit being both the environs that define a space and those naturally perceived. As a painter, Lucena felt the need to run against the limits of language. The duplicity of these slivers of light is the boundary that invites us to extend beyond the previously established liminal environments and spatial interstices to expand our point of view and create a new and unanticipated permeance.

The Night of the Purple Moon, marks the gallery’s inaugural presentation with the artist and his first solo gallery show in the United States. The gallery will be transformed into a Galerie des Illustres, an otherworldly environment with large scale portraits on canvas, cloaks, chaps and flags. Fictional heroes and historical reinterpretations embellish subjects from classical and canonical histories: from the Caribbean, Voodoo and magical deities, to function as a way for formerly enslaved humans to hold on to their African identity, despite the violence of Western colonialism. Barontini illuminates disparities in the visual and cultural history of the French Caribbean, which is rooted in African ancestry, yet virtually saturated with culture of an insular Caribbean.