Media Release
Defiant Argentinean artist to show work in London and NY
R.P. Browne’s APEX, a provocative exhibition of recent the artist’s recent work is confirmed at The Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Church, London in June 17-28 /2015 and at The Library Lounge, Midtown Manhattan in December 1-18/2015. The artist promises to “flood the space with landscapes of the city swamp and portraits of its rulers”.
Please click RP Browne s APEX press release to see the full statement
If you’ve been following closely the progress of the APEX project, then you already know this story. For everyone else I’ll make it short.
From the very beginning of the series I had this image in my head, and made several sketches (see APEX on the pipeline).
It was a natural spin-off of the piece “Water”, previously called “The swamp”, where I made a landscape merging New York and London’s skylines on the back of a croc which lied motionless underwater.
For some reason I left it there; the piece seemed too ambitious and I lacked the technical clarity to address it. So I carried on with other parts of the project.
However, while visiting the Dublin Zoo, the piece was brought back to my mind. A croc’s green and greedy pair of eyes looking from a position of power (thankfully from behind a safety glass) somehow elicited my artistic ambition… I had to give this one a try!
The technical problems, of course, remained. How was I going to make a credible Manhattan background and blend it with a perfectly positioned croc, as in the one of the photos taken in the Zoo?
The first attempt, which I painted in a small format (60 x 80 cm), disappointed me. It wasn’t nearly as crudely “in your face” as I had envisioned it. For the second time, I gave the idea further time to mature.
And then one day everything changed. I saw it immediately, right there in front of me and a hundred more consumers: the raw material and technical solution altogether. It was even framed and ready to be placed in the trolley for check out…in the decoration area of IKEA!
A motif replicated and sold by the thousands in as many IKEA outlets all over the globe, was going to become a unique base for that powerful but elusive idea. And so it was; I finally begun the painting…
Here’s the before and after. The “after” would eventually become the calling card and poster of the exhibition, as I’m sure some of you’ve found out checking your recent post.
I recently made a short “business” trip to Milano, city which in the past I had only bypassed on the way to other north Italian cities. Milano shows its past and present power pretty much everywhere, starting with a robust and dominant architecture.
My business consisted on selecting and buying five to six cuts of suit fabric for the next characters in “The Boardroom”, the last and remaining part of the APEX series. As charming as Dublin can be, this sort of fabric simply can’t be found here… so I reverted to the fashion factory itself: distances in Europe are short!
My Dublin Italian connections tipped me off in advance, and I went straight to a spot where great fabrics were offered “scampoli” – at an affordable price (a tenth of the retail cost). These are cuts which wouldn’t be enough to make a suit (I learned that at least you need 6 meters for one suit) but were perfect for my new set of “canvases”.
The selected shop, “Il Vecchio Drappiere”, was everything I wished for. A Milanese family business solely dedicated to sell the best quality suit fabrics with hundreds of patterns and textures to choose from, and all the time in the world to do so. What’s best, it’s location in Via Meravigli made obvious a visit to Santa Maria Delle Grazie, to admire the restored “Last Supper” by Leonardo.
Hopefully this background story will further enrich this series of paintings about the power driven specimen among us, everyday humans.
