January 20 – March 11, 2017
Opening January 19 from 6 to 9 p.m.
Rue des Sablons 6, 1205 Geneva
The Galerie Xippas Geneva is delighted to present an exhibition by the artist Dean Monogenis. On this occasion, he will show a set of recent paintings.
Dean Monogenis paints environments torn apart between urban landscape and elements of nature. He depicts incomplete constructions, residential buildings and colourful scaffolds standing in the middle of rocky landscapes and dense vegetation. His paintings reflect a state in constant mutation and transition, a conflict between massive urbanisation and a nature that doesn’t surrender.
By painting in successive layers and using for each of it different pictorial techniques, Dean Monogenis creates a fiction of a reality always changing. He usually paints on wood or plastic panel and mixes graphic elements made with stencils and spontaneous strokes of paint. Dean Monogenis doesn’t hesitate to sand some parts of his paintings to go back to a previous layer. This way of working allows him to work precisely but also gives him room for improvisation.
The title Metafiction is an accurate depiction of Dean Monogenis’s work. What the visitor sees is a fiction that describes itself as one. The set of paintings being shown here can be divided into three themes: distance, intimacy and distortion. In the first group, the viewer’s position to the building is far away and allows him to take in the whole scene as a somewhat traditional landscape. The scene is inhabited by multiple edifices that function like characters in a play. In the second group, the viewer is invited to enter the space. There is often a perspectival change leading the viewer’s eye to one point on the horizon and challenging his experiential impulse. In the last group of paintings, he builds a visual rivalry between the foreground and the background. The graphic elements don’t allow a clear view on the second layer. This layering serves as a reminder that our often, perfect postcard images are encumbered by real world obstructions. The abstracted imagery on this primary surface is made of fragments from other images that on a subconscious level connect to the whole picture. Like disparate memories fused together in a moments recollection.
Dean Monogenis was born in New York in 1973. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute Chicago and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2012, the Galerie Xippas in Athens was the first one to show Dean monogenis’s painting in Europe. He took part in many group exhibition around Europe and the United States. In 2013, he showed his work at the Bronx Museum of Art / Wave Hill and a year later at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne in France. The same year, he took part in the Volta in New York. In 2016, he had a solo show at the Center Art Contemporary (CCA) Andratx in Majorca, Spain.
