Never Falling Together at Blank Projects

South Africa Thu 30-09-2010

Never Falling Together at Blank Projects
Press Release

Blank projects is pleased to present "Never Falling Together", an exhibition of new work by Trasi Henen

Henen is one of South Africa's most exciting young painters. Henen's latest canvases are battlegrounds where abstract and representational imagery collide.

MNMNMNMN (2010) by Trasi Henen | Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas | 1300 x 900mm

Through a process of creation and destruction, these works challenge the medium, herself and the viewer, resulting in paintings accomplished with verve and intensity that reverberate in the mind.

"Never Falling Together" is Trasi Henen's third solo exhibition. She was born in 1981 in Johannesburg and lives in Cape Town.

"In analytic geometry, an asymptote* of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as they tend to infinity. There is a tragedy in this, that although travelling parrallel to one another, the lines never meet.

My work explores landscape and desire. I am interested in liminal spaces, in Lacan and Zizek and the misfortune of modernism. I have an ambivalent relationship to architecture, it continues to weave its way into my work. My working process is contingent, I build and then destroy, and build again and so on. Consisting of multiple views, in the work I weave together fragments of quotidian imagery and objects, both real and imaginary. Letting the process guide me, sometimes to a cul de suc, I then have to find my way back again." - Trasi Henen

"Henen's work transcends the abject-chic of 90's painters too embarrassed by their medium's history to actually paint properly. Instead the scratchy lines, paint drips and half-erased images become properly integrated into the surfaces, like the syntax of indecision elevated to the position of a full language." -Michael Smith (2006:http://www.artthrob.co.za/06feb/news/bestof.html )

"Contemporary painting is a consciousness and a set of practices. These are animated by the tension between its ready made history and discursive framing, and the space it opens for imaginative, affective invention. Painting is not passive. Understood in this way, painting becomes a perfect opportunity for expressing and reflecting the cultural moment in all its complexity. Painting seems a particularly apt resource for an emerging generation that seeks to engage the burden of the past in new ways. This possibility is powerfully evoked, for example, on Trasi Henen's imaginary metropolis paintings. Henen's choice of painting is deliberate: "It's the emotional thing that I want." The informed concreteness of painting and its process based immediacy, the essential, slippery shapelessness of this carnal medium offers just that." Penny Siopis (2005:http://artsouthafrica.com/?article=233)

Footnote

* The word asymptote is derived from the Greek asymptotos which means "not falling together"

Posted By: Hirum Ndungu

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