March 13th through April 6th, 2013

Opening Reception: Thursday March 14, 5:30- 7:30 p.m.

Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce the exhibition, Lampblack, an exhibition of new framed paintings on paper by Bruno Fazzolari.

 

Lampblack continues Bruno Fazzolari's investigation of synesthesia and abstraction. The ink paintings and perfume were developed in dialogue with each other over the last two years. 

For this exhibition, a scent created by the artist will be featured. A bottle with an atomizer will allow visitors to experience the scent while taking in the framed paintings. The perfume, also called Lampblack, takes its name from the primary pigment in India ink. The complex accord is structured around Nagarmotha, an oil derived from the roots of the Cypriol plant that grows in Madhya Pradesh, India.

Fazzolari's paintings feature an exceptionally dense India Ink that often buckles the paper and sometimes forms a craquelure. His colors (dense blacks, fruity magentas, cold greens, along with some lemon yellows) reflect the palette of the perfume. The ink paintings are made on paper taken from style and fashion magazines-the sorts of pages that present perfumes, exotic places and desirable objects. The marks obscure and clarify these images, revealing a painter's view on photography that picks out latent forms and shapes in unexpected ways so that habitual ways of looking are disabled and/or displaced.

"The language of scents had not remained stationary since the 1830 epoch. It had continued to develop, had followed the march of the century, had advanced side-by-side with the other arts. Like them, it had adapted itself to the whims of artists and connoisseurs...inventing scented albums, imitating the flower posies of Takeoka, mingling lavender and clove to produce Rondeletia, marrying patchouli and camphor to obtain the singular aroma of China ink."  

                    -Joris-Karl Huysmans, from À Rebours.  

The exhibition will feature a scent personally formulated and bottled by the artist. Visitors will be able to experience the scent while taking in the framed paintings. He has exhibited nationally and has been included in shows at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco and the Katonah Museum of Art in New York.  He is also a writer and critic and teaches at the California College of the Arts.  He received his B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.