APRIL 10-22, 2013 

BOLSA DE VALORES,

MéXICO D.F. 

Paseo de la Reforma, 255 Col. Cuauhtémoc

THE POOL NYC is proud to present Selvatica, a show at the Bolsa de Valores, with works by Eteri Chkadua and Bianca Sforni.

Selvatica is  a Latin word used to refer to plants and flowers growing spontaneously on the earth.

The show is titled Selvatica because both Chkadua’s and Sforni’s research comes from a primordial interest in natural and human instincts.

Flowers are a recurring subject in Bianca Sforni photographs and the artist is attempting to draw, their shapes and their constant metamorphosis through her 4×5 camera. Her flowers become something else in her photographs.

Sforni transmits the viewer her hard effort to be surrounded by these magical and dangerous flowers for long time. Bright and primary colors, coming out of her images, are captured in different moments, with extra long exposures and Datura, out of the photographic film, moves into view suddenly blooming stimulating feelings of dance, lightness and mutation.

Daturas are infesting flowers, blossoming at night. Their properties, often used for medical purposes, can also be very dangerous and toxic. ‘Datura intoxication typically produces a complete inability to differenziate fantasy from reality’.

For Bianca Sforni the photographic subject is just a pretext to study forms and emotions.

For the exhibition at the Bolsa, we propose Datura next to the Gentlemen’s club work from After-Dark, which is also a book.

During Sforni’s investigation on the gentlemen’s club in L.A., there is a great desire of revealing the human side of women and men, from the perspective of a special ‘reporter’.

Bianca emphasizes certain lights and signs, in order to confer a mysterious atmosphere, made of a city that appears extremely empty and full at the same time. There is a sense of loneliness in those places that are extremely well illuminated and pointed out.

The exterior image is probably the reflection of what happens inside.

Speaking of Eteri Chkadua’s paintings, the word selvatica can be immediately associated to her work.

Her penchant for representing someone who resembles herself, but it’s not exactly herself, as she says, is a primitive gesture.

Eteri, who is originally from former Soviet Georgia, but emigrated in the late 1980s to the USA, has been painting since early childhood.

She paints women to describe different emotional conditions of a human being. Chkadua can mix in the same canvas stories and traditions of her motherland with objects, meanings, and influences of places where she has lived and has visited, among them New York, Tokyo, and Kingston (Jamaica). Traditional jet black Georgian hair braids and ancient battle swords dance improbably against Jamaica’s slow-motion tropical backdrop. Her many trips to Mexico deeply influenced her otherwise Flemish palate. Eteri’s frequent use of floral images are not extant botanical representations, but rather phantasmagorical displays of her own creations.

There is a heroin, who is always the Deus Ex Machina of the painting, who is orchestrating the whole scene, showing many human feelings and a deep decadence of the whole world. Traditions, costumes, food, technology, and nature are all linked together in order to highlight how easily a human being can be tempted.