Messages: Overt-Covert at Paris Koh Fine Arts

Bill Pangburn, Rivulet 2, monoprint with gilding2024, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Messages: Overt-Covert
Bill Pangburn, Renee Magnanti, Jose Camacho
Paris Koh Fine Arts
October 30th through November 30th, 2024
Curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos

By MARK BLOCH, December 2024

This elegant show tells three art-maker’s stories, weaving tales by conveying coded missives to the viewer—and toward each other. They have done so with words, but also without them; direct and eye-catchingly, but also by hanging back a bit in the shadows, inviting closer readings. This storytelling emanates language but not fully fleshed out narrative. Luckily, they are each articulate about the processes they utilyze and tackle with passion.

Their dynamics, individually and collectively, create a back and forth, first between two members of a couple who work very differently, Panburn and Magnanti, married, and then the curator, Thalia Vrachopoulos, brings in a third person, Camacho, that creates a freshness in the space, establishing unexpected new relationships across the room. This is the work of three artists and a curator engaged in a verbal/non-verbal trialogue.

 


Left: Renee Magnanti, Cretan Pattern with Italian CIntaglio with watercolor and paper yarn weaving and crochet, 27.5 x 8 in, 2017. Right: Renee Magnanti, Venetian Lace Pattern with Overshot Weaving, Intaglio with watercolor, encaustic, and paper yarn weaving, 27 x 8 i, 2017, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

“This exhibition brings together three artists who, despite their adherence to non-representational media, communicate indelible messages.” said the curator Dr. Vrachopoulos. “By sending subliminal signals of thoughtful examination, responsible action, and ethical solidarity, they each are addressing issues that permeate the globe.”

Renee Magnanti’s weaved wall hangings have a timeless quality detailing her intense research and seriousness, firing on many levels at once—her geometric and linguistic ornamentation pays tribute to unknown women scientists, evoking both traditional and modern motifs. Her own diligence and that of her subjects create an echo of women workers in the fiber industry, past and present, laboring tirelessly, often without human rights.

Renee Magnanti, In Athens After World War l, intaglio with watercolor, vintage lace, and paper yarn weaving, 32 x 8.5 in
2019, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Magnanti’s print-weavings consist of intaglio prints embellished with watercolor, then cut into strips, occasionally colored with encaustic.  She weaves the strips (“which become part of the weft” she adds) to make these paper yarn hangings she calls “print-weavings,” adding “depending on the piece, I also include vintage lace or crochet and sometimes antique gold thread.” For instance, she acquires hand made kami-ito thread spun from handmade paper from a weaver-owned small business in Japan who she originally met in New York. She acquires vintage lace from thrift shops but is also given it from friends, even crochet pieces made by her great-grandmother. Beginning her technique in 2012, she sources her metallic yarns and other materials from street vendors locally as well as from Greece, Italy, Japan and France.

Like the other two artists in the show, she combines multiple processes within her weavings: printmaking including intaglio etching or dry point, and painting in watercolor and encaustic.

Renee Magnanti, Untitled in Blue and Gold, intaglio with weaving - metallic, 24K gold, and paper thread, 16 x 8 in, 2020, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Cretan Pattern with Italian Crochet references women around the world doing fiber arts, a subject she is obviosly passionate about. In Athens After World War I uses needlework patterns from Greece as a design element and found text from that time period, including a feminist publication. Untitled in Blue and Gold  from 2020 was inspired by embroidery from a Rome synagogue on antique fabric that she saw in Rome’s Jewish Museum.

Finally, 2021’s Women of Science is an impressive diptych of two 9 foot weavings, part of a “women in science” series she is still working on. Alice A. Ball was a 25 year old African American chemistry professor and researcher  who developed the most effective therapy for leprosy. She died at age 24 from inhaling chlorine gas in her unventilated laboratory in Hawaii. The second hanging highlights Eunice Foote and Rachel Carson together in one long weaving. “Foote’s 1896 Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays laid the foundation for understanding climate change,” Magnanti said. Then, invoking the woman who first warned the world about climate change in 1962, Magnanti quoted the other prognosticator: “Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring ‘Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts’.”

Magnanti's delicate works powerfully speak about our delicate planet.

Renee Magnanti, Women of Science, Intaglio with watercolor, metallic and paper yarn weaving, 102 x 28 in, 2021, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Conversely, Jose Camacho’s text-based works have a gritty and industrial texture, subtly built into letters and symbols. “I’m interested in visual fiction, and the expansion of the painted surface as a picture,” he said. “This particular body of work aims to deal with the relationship concerning text and image and the colonized status that the island of Puerto Rico must endure.”

The gallerist Paris Koh explained, “the word 'embuste' means a lie or deception. And in the dark and light diptych made up of two panels, ‘La Isla es la Isla’ means the island is the island.” Camacho’s stamped and leftover ink traces etch out fleeting words, language, code, and expressions boldly echoing “the sounds of the streets” from the island of Puerto Rico.

 Jose Camacho, False Front. Acrylic, enamel, on paper mounted on wood panels, 36 by 48 in., 2019, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

“I identify these works as the graphite paintings, paper mounted onto the canvas, with text fastidiously stenciled on the surface. Some of the works will basically remain white, leaving the text with a ghostly appearance. The paper used in those works come from older paper aged with visual information, and had developed a studio patina,” Camacho commented.

“About the work, The End of a Love Affair, for the past few years I have been collecting all the pencil shredding and leftover graphite bits and pieces that have been employed in the making of the graphite paintings,” Camacho revealed. ‘Making art is always about an obsession, a failure, and awkwardness. This formal impurity about art and painting create a conundrum, a vicious circle—an end to a love affair.
 

 Jose Camacho, Babel, Collage, enamel, acrylic on board mounted on canvas., 32 by 27 1/2 in.. 2023, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

The final artist, Bill Pangburn, creatively and strikingly addresses water shortages, a part of his life in his native Texas that he wishes was not an issue. He has been making works about his beloved water for a while. Pangburn's flowing, linear imagery is derived from impressions of rivers, currents, and waterfalls. “I find that the gilding adds a shimmering light that changes when viewed from different angles, the way sunlight dances upon water’s ever changing surface, enhancing the movement, depth, and fluidity,” he pronounced.

Confronting the need for immediate action against water scarcity, Pangburn’s blue work entitled Waterwars is composed of stenciled eponymous text in recurrent and consecutive lines, seemingly like torrential precipitation flowing out of the blue-hued paper. Pangburn’s opalescent works—a vibrant watery surface of metallic and iridescent tones—before and after gold leaf is applied, play tricks on the eye as invoked in Comacho’s ‘Embuste' work.

Bill Pangburn, Freeflow Gold, monoprint with gilding, 2024, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Pangburn told me, ‘There is a rich tradition of using metal leaf, flakes, powder, and metallic colored inks in printmaking which has always appealed to me.” He uses the material to create a kind of twilight world between presence and absence, the precious and the earthy.

Pangburn calls his pieces “gilded monoprints” because each is unique, built from a one of a kind printing experience over a one of a kind gilding process. His monoprints are copperplate engravings, etchings or linoleum cuts over real gold or platinum leaf, never imitations. His linear imagery is etched or carved to be printed repeatedly or once onto his singular gilded base materials, here paper, he refers to as the substrate. “A relief print can be printed by hand and without a press,” he added.

Left: Bill Pangburn, Silver Path, monoprint with gilding, 2023.. Right: Bill Pangburn, Freeflow, monoprint with gilding, 2024, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

“When inking an etching plate, a thin residue or film of ink can be left on the surface of the plate so that it prints what is known as plate tone. It is even, like a watercolor wash. It can be darker, lighter or nonexistent, imparting the interaction of the color elements,” he explained.

When I asked him about the look of Asian calligraphy in his work he replied, “I think of these prints as small vignettes or the equivalent of haiku.”

Bill Pangburn, Double Pink, monoprint with gilding, 2024, Paris Koh Fine Arts.

Each of these artists are pushing the boundaries of messaging, language and communication in these rapidly changing times, calling into question the status quo, not directly or overtly but furtively, mysteriously, subtly and indirectly, through their own quirky and individualistic relationships with the ideas that live behind their mark making and their inspiring attention to detail as they convey those ideas—each via their own unique secret code, thriving in their three separate practices.

“They maintain an innovative relationship with conceptual and formal abstraction in their works,” Vrachopoulos said, referring to something the three artists share.WM