penelOpe pandemOnium (2014)
Odyssey pandemOnium : a migrational metaphor

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November 15th - December 16th, 2015
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Galerie Richard 121 Orchard Street New York City
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http://www.galerierichard.com/en_exhibitions_grande.php?id=301&numero=1

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pandemOnium is a new series of paintings by Joseph Nechvatal that returns us symbolically to Homer’s displaced champion and his odd wanderings. However, Odyssey pandemOnium does not illustrate Homer’s epic poem. Rather, hints of classical sumptuousness and visual order are here submitted to controlled disorder through indeterminacy. This chance element is important in the construction of a lyrical consideration of human migration.
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The characters Odysseus, his son Telemachus, his waiting wife Penelope, Polyphemus, Poseidon and a lyric siren loosely come together to suggest the beauty and pain of the migrating world. Present in the paintings is a partially hidden world of people and places (and images) lost and at ideological drift, looking for scenic alternatives.
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The 10 paintings of Odyssey pandemOnium are conceptually situated within Nechvatal’s immersive noise theory. They make use of a complicated turmoil produced from close exchanges within figure/ground relationships that challenges us to think outside of the normal system of human perception. Classical looking figures are embedded into a complex and subtle ground so that the normal figure/ground relationship more or less merges. Painted on suede-like velours canvas, the colors used are dusty and subtle. This new support better contributes to the fugitive nature of the floating and migrating imagery. That double intricacy is what Odyssey pandemOnium is about, in one sense: being misplaced and adrift. The viewer’s eye must navigate the visual pandemonium in a way that suggests Odysseus’s wanderings.
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This pandemonium is characteristic of Nechvatal’s art-of-noise theory that he established in his book Immersion Into Noise in 2011 and further developed last year in his Punctum Press book, Minóy.
Within the framework of Odyssey pandemOnium, Punctum Press has launched a book with an original epic poem about the eros of the eye by Joseph Nechvatal entitled Destroyer of Naivetés.

Odyssey pandemOnium : a migrational metaphor
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