Oscar Varese Feedback
Vernissage: Thursday, December 3 at 6 pm
Exhibition: December 4 to 23, 2009
Artist’s Talk: Thursday, December 10 at 7 pm
Exhibition Press Release:
Feedback, a new series of work by Oscar Varese, presents “three dimensional paintings” that combine sculptural concerns with a poetics of painting. The work is loosely inspired by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, and the artist’s search for a new visual language.
Purposely avoiding any narratives, the works take their cue from the Minimalist considerations of the object itself, offering a neutral and immediately physical relation for the viewer. And yet within the same moment colour, scale and proportion are meant to trigger emotion, experience and memory. Recognizing these contradictions, the works are concerned with finding a delicate equilibrium between positive and negative energies, while also acknowledging the subtle, unexpected directions that may arise between those boundaries.
The works investigate issues of social transformation. Alluding to McLuhan’s theories, Varese notes that the Technical Revolution characterized by fragmentation, specialization and rationality, has given way to a new threshold or paradigm. “Where the Industrial Revolution is seen as an extension of our physical, outer bodies, the Electric Revolution becomes an extension of our nervous system – mainly an information system, and above all a feedback system.” It is within this collision/transition of distinctly different worlds that Varese maintains his search for a visual language giving expression to a spiritual belief – the possibility of finding balance within chaos.
Oscar Varese is a Montreal based artist. After graduating with a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University he spent close to ten years within the Design and Installations Department at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In 2001 he returned to Concordia and earned his second BFA with Distinction in the Design Art program concentrating on graphics and conceptual furniture design.