Rochelle Feinstein – Time in the picture: Quotes that stand for themselves
By: Victor Cos Ortega
During a stay in Rome, Rochelle Feinstein noticed that all her painting material came to her by Amazon package. Inspired by a group of works, which she combined as Plein Air and took up the history of the relationship between technology and art. A striking feature of Feinstein’s Plein Airs are the visible edges along which the fabrics were folded for shipping, and which divide the pictures into square fields in the unfolded state, which in turn are taken up by the applied painting as boundaries. If you have a little knowledge of the art history of the 20th century. century, will recognize the modernist tropic of the grid. If you take a look at Feinstein’s oeuvre, you will also encounter the grid as a central motif of your own preoccupation with form.
So much so, in all superficiality, as a reference to the cultural-historical, art-historical and self-referential references that form the material for Feinstein’s work and are contrary to color, form and surface as the materials from which modernist painting was made. The exhibition text states accordingly: “Where the modernists of the 20th century Since the 19th century, Feinstein’s abstractions are deeply intertwined with the world in all its chaotic diversity and reduced the medium to color on a flat surface.
In the Secessions exhibition Time in the Picture, Amazon, as a supplier of the material for conceptual art, and, somewhat more fundamentally, as an intermediary of value/information, is not ubiquitous, but the anecdote is vivid, and a number of exhibited works, making up one of a total of three groups of works shown, are derived from the Plein Airs.
An important anchor in Today Show is the rainbow as a color palette – not as color/visual experience/natural phenomenon. The rainbow, like the grid, is a recurring motif in Feinstein’s work. In its various manifestations, Feinstein’s four decades of exciting investigation of the origin, change, ambiguity and loss of visual and/or pictorial means of meaning. By quoting, “the images point out about themselves.”
The lust for recognition is not granted by the curatorial side – there is no consumer compulsion. It’s a bit quiet in the exhibition room, quiet like in the ivory tower. With all the entanglement of the works of art with “political, social and ecological questions”, the belief in the ultimate autonomy of art interferes.
Read the article online on artmagazine.
