Galerie Richard New York is delighted to debut the work of Christophe Avella-Bagur for the first time in the United States. The gallery will exhibit recent paintings from his ongoing series, Floating Souls from May 31st to July 21st, 2012.
On an ethereal ground of white light Avella-Bagur shows us archetypalre presentations of male and female bodies that answer our expectations of mass-produced perfection. Avella-Bagur disrupts this ideal with a second layer of portraits painted in visceral flesh-tones that never quite register with the face’s outline. The two portraits are collapsed together to create disturbingly distorted juxtapositions painted in the grotesque manner of El Grecoor Goya.
Avella-Bagur first began the Floating Souls series in 2005, working in a medium-sized format. These paintings contained archetypal figures with their eyes closed, in which a “floating soul” was depicted attempting to register with its host. Now the idealized bodies have their eyes open, creating tension and visual complexity between the two faces. The exhibition is composed of six large portraits: a self-portrait, three small children, a woman breast-feeding her baby and two large charcoal drawings on paper.