FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bradley Biancardi
Moving Pictures
October 12th – November 10th 2019
Opening reception: Friday, October 12th, 7pm – 9:30pm
Arts+Leisure is thrilled to announce Moving Pictures, an exhibition of paintings and woodblock prints by Bradley Biancardi. Presenting a body of smaller, restrained canvas alongside two large-scale paintings characteristically packed with near life-size figures, the artist explores the intersection of human communication and its spatial settings from various perspectives, dissecting our relationships with the intimate physical spaces we inhabit on both micro- and macro- levels. Framing these spaces as sites for the display of human social behavior, Biancardi packs his canvases with figures in dynamic motion, often interwoven with signifiers of contemporary society and mass culture. Biancardi’s technique, underscored by sharp contours and expressive, impasto brushwork, heightens the intensity of his socio-spatial dramas, imbuing their figures with a rawness that parallels the intensity of their emotional displays.
There is a marked sense of disconnection among the figures that populate the two large canvases and woodblock prints, and though they are physically close to each other, they appear to act independently, driven by altogether different motives and desires. Charting the “inherent awkwardness of communication”, in the artist’s own words, Moving Pictures suffuses the rituals of daily life with undertones of absurdity and sarcastic humor. Biancardi examines personal mannerisms and rituals in “The Sock, the Fan, the Angel in the Room”, a woodblock print, repeating the form of the female subject at varying stages of her morning routine, highlighting the individual nature of habits and behavior.
In “A Curious Collection of Critical Clues”, the relationship of the central male and female figures, ostensibly lovers, is almost unsettlingly ambiguous; their presence beside each other is rapt with tension and a sort of vacant selfishness. Here, otherwise inane objects appear as portents, such as the pair of locks lying between the figure and their keys, dangled overhead by the male figure, suggestive of the precarious nature of interpersonal feeling and attachment.
In “USS Entropy: Ship is Wrecked”, a sleeping woman is transported, along with her contemporary accoutrements of an iPhone and Advil bottle, to an obscure, quasi-mythological setting. The phrases “All Original First Generation Activist Organizer Removed From Politics Into Greek Myths” and “Please Lend a Hand I’m Only a Person”, painted across the top of the canvas, reframe the bedroom as a site of hallucinatory, surreal visualization. “Against the Grain” embodies an inverse approach, portraying a cropped glimpse of wood flooring in exacting detail. Whether focusing on the micro- or macrocosmic elements of human interaction in intimate space, Biancardi’s work uses the varying substances of his subjects, from the flesh of the human form to wooden planks and other domestic materials, as vehicles for expression and allusion.