Thierry Feuz and Jeremy Thomas

MARCH 28 - MAY 9, 2009

Presented as Samuel Freeman Gallery at Bergamot Station, Santa Monica.

Thierry Feuz and Jeremy Thomas
March 28 to May 9, 2009

Geneva-based artist Thierry Feuz will exhibit a vivid lacquer and enamel fantasy of color, shapes and quasi-botany at Samuel Freeman in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. Santa Fe based Jeremy Thomas will install a series of inflated steel sculptures in the courtyard garden.

Thierry’s work is a botanical wonderland where petals blur into abstractions, stems reduce into lines, and vibrant colors appear unreal by the very fact that they are culled from the extreme ends of a natural palette that too often goes unseen. At first sight, the Vienna-born artist’s work plays out like a survey of the highpoints of the natural world – flower petals pressed between the pages of a book, or back-lit specimens pressed onto a microscope slide – yet at every turn, there are also the tell-tale signs of artifice.

Detached organic forms float in an inchoate white background, their disconnectedness betraying an artist’s handicraft. A coacervate mass assumes myriad colors, as if it was being viewed through an uncalibrated spectrometer. And industrial-grade lacquer finishes transform naturalistic referentialism into exhibitionist spectacle. This calculated portrayal of the neither here nor there results in a stirring examination of artistic invention and mimicry—and in the process, it turns the microscope back on ourselves, putting on stark display the increasing inseparability civilization imposes on the natural and artificial world.

Feuz studied at the Ecole Superior des Beaux Arts in Geneva. His work has been exhibited internationally at galleries in Brussels, Copenhagen, Geneva, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Vancouver and Zurich. Most recently he exhibited at the National Academy of Science, Washington, D.C. This is his first solo exhibition at Samuel Freeman.