Besharat Gallery

ANTONI TAULÉ

Paintings & Photography at Barbizon

17^th May- 30^th June 2013

In 2012 the Besharat Gallery, based in Atlanta, opened a new space in Barbizon. Here Massoud Behsarat, a passionate patron of the arts regularly presents the works of those artists whose work he loves and wishes to share with a larger public. Amongst these is Antoni Taulé, a globally renowned artist who has enjoyed enormous success amongst collectors and connoisseurs enraptured by the veritable poetry and mystery of his paintings.

Having already exhibited in Atlanta a group of works from the series ‘Identity/Alterity’, Taulé now presents in Barbizon an exhibition uniting twenty-three paintings and photographs created between Paris and Formentera from the 1970s until today.

An architect by training, a photographer and painter, Taulé stages light in a perpetual game of mirrors and perspective, to quote “ the keystone , the light as drawing, as experience and subject of the oeuvre” ( Roberto Bonnacorsi, Villa Tamaris) through which he formulates this simple question: where are we ?

TheLetter, 1975, oil on canvas (detail), 97 x 130 cm,

Upon these canvases of vast dimensions minimalist spaces predominate, with reality fast fading. Empty rooms, obscure corners, deep perspectives, glow across the evanescence of those vacillating sources of light: everything conspires to install a sense of doubt, encouraging introspection.

Sometimes, when the presence of the human figure appears, it does so in an unexpected manner, its apparition rich in mystery, traversing the solitary silhouettes, silent and mute witnesses of the permanent conflict between shadow and light. Dream and the reality become indistinguishable. Here the theatrical dimension is clearly affirmed; each of these paintings suggests the décor of some new enigma.

Could it be possible that Taulé utilizes architectural form as a metaphor of those mental space in which are played out all our doubts, our anxieties, our choices and metaphysical demands?

Marie Claire Uberquoi, curator of his major exhibition at the Fondation Vila Casas notes that “with Taulé the treatment of the image reveals an ambiguity wherein operates a fusion between the pictorial, the painterly, and the photographic. This is one of the most characteristic traits within his work. The photographs are not used as a preparatory stage for the paintings; they are their own creations in themselves, in which the composition and the effects of the reverse-angle light create the very same bewitchment as the paintings.”

This same month of May 2013 the photographs of Taulé are simultaneously on display on the first floor of l’Alcazar in the 6^th arrondissement. In addition l’Instituto Cervantes has selected two of his paintings for an exhibition in homage to the novel Marelle by Julio Cortázar, the celebrated Argentine writer. Cortázar, who was fascinated by the paintings of Taulé, wrote of them: “in total they naturally breed an atmosphere both fantastical and profoundly real. This lures you to imagine that each of his paintings is an instant of something which has not existed or which could come into existence at any moment.”

Txeca, 1978, 60 x90 cm, photograph, inv.1464

ABOUT  ANTONI TAULÉ

The work of Antoni Taulé has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, in 2010 at the Fondation Vila Casas (Barcelona) and in 2006 at Villa Tamaris (La Seyne-sur-mer). His works are represented in major private collections and important international public institutions in America, Japan, China and, of course, Spain.

Taulé was born in Barcelona in 1945. He studied architecture, graduated with his diploma in architecture, and worked briefly in the Paris office of Le Corbusier. His first solo exhibition took place in 1966 and in 1972 he completed his training in London at the Royal Academy of Art and the Chelsea College of Art & Design.

In the 1960s Taulé created performances and street paintings. Since 1970 he has painted imaginary architectures, “rooms, tables and chairs”, his paintings have the appearance of reality, a certain autobiographical character but are inspired by dreams which give space to the creation of photographs and paintings.( Series« Space Outside Time », 1974 ; « Blind Velázquez », 1975 ; « Contre- jour », 1976 ; « Laboratory of Awaiting », 1977).

Beginning in the 1980s he created set-designs for the theatre (The Three Sisters of Tchékhov directed by Ariel Garcia Valdès, 1982; Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute directed by Simone Benmussa, 1984), and for the opera (Washington Square by Noureev for the Palais Garnier in Paris and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, 1985).

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, grottoes and prehistory, (series « Threshold of the Cavern », « Cromocosmos »), ruins and deserts but also scientific research have been at the heart of his oeuvre. Toward the end of the 1990s his paintings evoked geometric environments, almost always uninhabited and recalling his travels. (Function F, 2003; Destruction of Symbols, 2006; Tian Men, 2006). Since 2007, he has paid homage to literature (La Mer mêlée au soleil, 2009), to photography (Brûlé de soleil, 2008), old master painting (LeCarlin, 2011) as well as contemporary (Portrait de Isabel Rawsthorne, 2010; The Vertical Enigma, 2011 ; La Cour carrée, 2011). In 2010 the Fondation Vila Casas granted him a retrospective (« The Magic of Silence »). In 2011 began the series « Identité Altérité » and « Taulé and his Circles ». In 2012, Antoni Taulé exhibited in Atlanta USA at Besharat Gallery. In 2013 he exhibited his paintings at the Forêt Verte gallery as well as at l’Institut Cervantès, whilst simultaneously showing his photography at l’Alcazar, at the Galerie Artrial in Perpignan and in Barbizon.

Besharat Gallery

40, Grande rue

77630 Barbizon

massoud@besharatgallery.com

Tél : 01 64 09 54 05

Alcazar

24, rue Mazarine 75006 – Paris

Tél : 01 53 10 23 21

CONTACTS PRESSE

Sylvia Beder

Tél. 01 42 18 09 42

sylvia@sylviabeder.com

www .sylviabeder.com

with

Paula Peace, piano • Helen Hwaya Kim, violin • Catherine Lynn, viola

Brad Ritchie, cello • Douglas Sommer, bass

and introducing Alex Wasserman, guest piano

Works by Schubert, Dvorak and Rossini…

Hosted by Massoud Besharat with Caroline & Phil Moise,

Nancy Koutnik & Michael Trost, Ray & John Uttenhove

at the Loft Home of Massoud Besharat at the

Besharat Gallery

165 Mangum Street SW, Atlanta 30313

404 524 4781

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

7:00 – 9:00 pm

Concert begins at 7:45 pm

Fall under the spell of the Afghan Girl’s gaze, and behold an evocative range of portraits from around the globe at famed photojournalist Steve McCurry’s The Unguarded Moment-on loan from Besharat Gallery and on display through September 28th at SCAD Atlanta. “Seeing so many disparate cultures firsthand has given me a real perspective on the world,” says McCurry. “I find that human nature is somewhat universal; wherever you’re from, there are certain fundamental similarities we have. You scratch the surface of religion or customs, and people are basically the same at the core.”

Massoud Besharat expands the presence of Besharat Gallery from Castleberry Hill to Europe, with the opening of Galerie Besharat in Barbizon, France.  Located just 35 miles outside of Paris, Barbizon is best known for the Barbizon School of Painters which include artists such as Millet, Rousseau, Corot and Daubigny.  Galerie Besharat opened this past Saturday, and featured Maestro Gigino Falconi in its inaugural exhibition.  This same exhibition will travel to Atlanta in March of 2013 in conjunction with the artist’s 80th birthday.  Galerie Besharat is located at 40 Grande Rue in Barbizon.

View the Inside Art interview with Gigino Falconi at the opening of Galerie Besharat: Gigino Falconi a Barbizon

Granite quarry his ‘bread and butter,’ but passion for art shines in Castleberry Hill.
By Chris Reinolds

by Adrian Dannatt

You meet the Spanish artist Alexandro Santana and you think, cripes, can he be for real? So handsome, so flamboyant, so seductive, so amusing — you’re not sure whether it’s intentional or inadvertent. And then you discover he is the son of a notorious Dominican admiral, that the tyrannical dictator Trujillo was best man at his parents’ wedding, that his mother was a fabled high-society beauty, that he grew up on battleships and estancias before going, inevitably, to Brown.

Even more surprisingly, Santana stayed in Providence for graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his degree in architecture, soon plying his trade in Manhattan and his adopted city of Savannah, where he eventually set up his own firm. Astonishingly, in this era of CAD, he draws every detail entirely by hand.

Considering his tweeds, his bow ties, his drawl and debonair dress, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that Santana’s architectural taste is strongly neo-classical, inspired by the vernacular Palladianism of antebellum Georgia, with of course a touch of the Postmodern.

Santana’s detailed and decorous architectural plans for his clients are complemented by drawings created solely for himself — exotic imaginary cityscapes and urban fantasias, like the dreams of Sir John Soane channeled through Aldo Rossi or John Hejduk. One’s appreciation of these drawings is enriched in turn by Santana’s pencil portraits of friends and lovers, personal sketches of disarming intimacy.

Santana’s line has a languid, fluid eroticism to it which perfectly suits his subjects; he touches them all with a graphite whisper coaxing them to appear.

But the surprise within the Santana oeuvre is his series of large-scale abstractions, outrageously bright and scandalously juicy paintings that were recently on view at the Besharat Gallery in Atlanta. The setting was indeed a fine and dramatic one, the scale and grandeur of its spaces, with walls of pure local granite, hardly better suited to a display of riotous color and anarchic vigor.

Some of Santana’s works bear hints of fragmentary imagery, from guns and weapons to genitals and guts, as if indexing a sublime violence matched by the savagery of his palette and his brushwork. In the 48 x 60 in. oil Haecceitia, for instance, formless blotches of rose and pale blue sprout a black line drawing of a foot in a high heel, or a series of louche paint marks that might well be lipstick kisses.

Clearly, more is going on here than idle expressionism. His exhibition title lends a clue: “Haecceitia: Homage à Michel Foucault.” Plumbing the catalogue essay, it becomes clear that Santana is seeking not decorative effect or personal expression, but rather is making a stab at painterly semiotics, an open-ended mode of signification (“haecceity” can be translated as “thisness”) that the artist claims “takes on a pictorial platform” in his work.

Whether or not Santana’s paintings rise to this philosophically mystical level, they certainly have an artistic flamboyance and wit that is as eccentrically remarkable as the artist himself. And that should be enough for anyone’s first major solo exhibition.

Alexandro Santana, “Haecceitia”, Nov. 19 – Mar. 1, 2010, at Besharat Gallery, 175 Peters Street SW, Atlanta, Ga. 30313

ADRIAN DANNATT is a New York-based critic and writer.

The Fame Monster

by Cielo Lutino on March 10, 2011