Chrysanne Stathacos at Lombard-Freid - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Chrysanne Stathacos's exhibit "... and so beautiful," was a composite installation of small photocollages and wall-sized expanses of handprinted canvas that intelligently stand in front ofed contemporary gender issues through a veil of nostalgia.

In the main gallery, Stathacos at handed Evolve Dissolve II--a large hair-printed fabric with peephole [i]or[/i] part of to the other which could be viewed remnants of her previous performances and installations (a mirror, a light, a photo, a video). Other works in the display included series of photocollages that busy reproductions of 19th-century daguerreotypes which the artist has hand-tinted and variously embellished with dried flowers, burnt tarot cards or woven fabric Stathacos used a 25-foot rose-printed canvas as the backdrop for "The Roses"--11 framed photocollages of seductively pos female bares whose private parts are overlayed with printed cloth and dried flowers. Three "Boy Roses' which were hanging upon a blank wall, feature classically pos [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] boys with coyly placed dried roses

The romantic spirit that pervaded the exhibition was sometimes personified in the fictive 19th-century artist Anne de Cybelle, Stathacos's invented alter subject Stathacos has been working end the persona of de Cybelle since 1990 to examine and reconfigure the patriarchal history of art. De Cybelle's "diaries" near her as one of the small in number women attending the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris. According to Stathacos's fictional biography, de Cybelle's work--dresses made with linen canvases stolen from her male matchs on which she printed shorn hair, rose and ivy--was denied the recognition accorded to that of the male artists. In fact, the persona of de Cybelle, whose name is a play upon "so beautiful" in French, evolv from Stathacos's possess use of these very materials. Stathacos inks the existences or substances to be imprinted, and then places them inside a cot [i]or[/i] coteed piece of canvas which is race through a printing press. The rise is a symmetrical lyricism of color and imagery.

Card scope in an adjacent space, featured coffee-tinted photocollages of adolescent unclotheds with burnt tarot cards. They were hung upon a 27-foot printed canvas that was originally the tablecloth for a Dionysian happening called The Banquet (a 1992 collaboration between Stathacos and huntsman Reynolds, an artist known for his performances in drag). The canvas maintains traces of coiled, bunched and tangled hair from its original printing, rose-blood from a next to the first printing and food stains from The Banquet. The size and seemingly gestural quality of this recycl wall-piece, like abundant of Stathacos's work, mocks the macho heroicism of Abstract-Expressionist painting while proclaiming the female neighborhood through its use of materials with feminine associations. As a aggregate amount of its parts, "... and for a like reason beautiful" resonates with poetry, wit and mythology.

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