Contemporary Fine Arts is proud to present the exhibition „Love´s Gonna Save The Day“ with new works by Christian Rosa (b. 1982, Sao Paulo) for Gallery Weekend. Rosa lives and works in Vienna and Los Angeles.

Most of the elements placed under tension by Christian Rosa are presented unassumingly and directly, unpredictable like a passing impulse, deployed without ceremony, and just as “untreated” as the canvas on which their movements unfold. Light, often almost whimsical, but without frills, they elude control before it can even set in. Their formlessness bypasses the rules of craft and gives no indication of learnability or mastery. Instead, such criteria are systematically cast off, as Rosa has taken not only this first “false” impression, but beginnings in general, the first signs of a movement, as his medium. Everything appears as if in a raw state, be it the “grey matter” of the canvas or the whole range of possibilities it offers: colour as stain, line as trace, form as clear symbol, square, squiggle, point or moment, made of a single quality, like a word of one syllable – everything remains on the initial level of formulation and participates only in this “preliminary form”.

With this approach – the weight of simplicity, raw form and materiality, the free play of forces – Rosa is clearly pursuing the achievements of modernism. He delves into its regulations and customs, using its exterior and its distinctive features, but confronting its former selves with an inappropriate exaggeration of its laws, tightening and dissecting them on their own terrain. Following their logic, he deactivates the protective shield of established value and begins a new round of profanization. It may come across as the demystification of an already demystified world, a destruction of gods where gods no longer seemed to exist. We see the vehicles of the action in an unfamiliar and surprising “nakedness”, with traces of the undesirable, facing charges of an “indecency” now known as “artlessness” – they have simply laid themselves down in the open space of untreated subject matter, on the ground of a reality that venerates no higher beings, whether they rule in the museums as inviolable values, shine out in the heavenly spheres of the media, or seek to dictate as figures of the fate of world history.

This is Christian Rosa’s first solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts. It will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Linda Yablonsky and Roberto Ohrt.

Enlaces de interés:

• Página de la exposición en el sitio web del Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA)
• Sitio Web de Christian Rosa.