Anthony Cudahy


Solo

Fool’s errand / Fool’s gold, GRIMM and Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2024

Double Spar, GRIMM and Hales Gallery, New York, NY 2023

A pearl caught between my teeth, GRIMM, Amsterdam, 2022

Coral Room, Hales Gallery, New York, NY, 2021

The Moon Sets A Knife, Semiose, Paris, 2021

Burn Across The Breeze, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY, 2021

Flames, Semiose, Paris, 2020


Museum

Like Night Needs Morning, CAP Centre d'art de Saint-Fons, 2024

Spinneret, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME, 2024

Conversation, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, Dole, 2023

Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, ICA Miami, FL, 2022


Two-Person

It Was Dark in His Arms, with Ian Lewandowski and Kenny Gardner, Deli Gallery, New York, NY, 2021


Group


Press


Contact

The Moon Sets A Knife, Semiose, Paris
May 22 - July 3, 2021

A Morning of Painting

Seventy-five unpublished pages by Marcel Proust have just been published by Gallimard, constituting, to the best of our knowledge, "the" first draft of his most famous work: In Search of Lost Time . Their importance lies less in the discovery of a hidden secret or a missing element that would shed light on the author's entire literary project than in a new understanding of the way in which his project is sketched out, his subject is established, his narrative fabric winds and unwinds through the lines from the very first words written on the blank page to the final version offered to readers. And God and the publishers know how much Marcel Proust returned, re-studied and re-wrote his manuscripts, his proofs, even the first printed sheets incessantly and tirelessly... Writing is thus a withdrawal from the world in order to better grasp and translate its existence, its sensations, its flavor and its stakes, but above all so that the life of writing itself overlaps and then merges with that which is described there. In other words, the ways of writing cannot be distinguished on one side by the voice of the narrator and that of his characters, and on the other the statement of the perfect sentence, the stake of the writer. The exercise of freedom in the risk of action.

The work of the American painter Anthony Cudahy is not far from such a project, since in each of his drawings or paintings he tries with certainty and determination to approach the most perfect expression of a breath or an emotion, the purest crystallization of an instant that life itself would not retain. And this attempt takes place, as with Marcel Proust, only through and in the line itself – black ink for one, subtle colors for the other. Here the objective is therefore less to definitively represent a state or a situation than to arrive at formulating them in a way as lively and vibrant as reality itself or, at least, as he – or we? – experienced it. So we will not be surprised on the one hand by the finesse and fluidity of the artist's touch, all in mastery and lightness, and on the other hand by compositions that play on the off-screen, the edges of the frame or the progressive dissolution of elements. It is therefore not a question of imitating life, but of revealing in a tangible and palpable way all the nuances of meaning, sensations and sensualities of existence. At the same time as it reveals, the painting delivers to the eye what it reveals. Also, never has the impression of being seized by what passes through us, of feeling what moves us, of touching what touches us been as intense as in the works that Anthony Cudahy offers us, even though they are as strange as they are foreign to us.

His exhibition at the Semiose gallery brings together about twenty paintings around the enigmatic title "A Moon Sets A Knife", borrowed from Federico García Lorca's work Bodas de sangre [ Blood Wedding ]. But if in the original play the moon leaves an abandoned knife in the air ["La luna deja un cuchillo abandonado en el aire, que siendo acecho de plomo quiere ser dolor de sangre"], in Anthony Cudahy's work Cutting Terror the kneeling female character firmly brandishes a knife - made of lead? - in order to tear, in a bloody pain, a canvas representing an equine motif familiar to the artist. Far from the banal destruction of a failed canvas, the treatment of this painting in shades of red, the pose of the protagonist, the decisive gesture of the cut and the canvas on the ground treated as a reflective surface make it a veritable pictorial blood wedding revisited in the form of a ritual murder or an unprecedented variation of the myth of Narcissus. Similar open games of intertwined meanings are thus at work in all of Anthony Cudahy's proposals carefully selected for this exhibition. And the balance between realism and symbolism, description and fiction, suggests a thousand filiations to decipher and reconnect, a thousand threads to unwind and then reweave.

Beyond that, it is above all the temporal fabric that seems to be at stake in his works: the time of figuration and the time that is figurative. And both call upon a retrospective look at the past as much as the verticality of the present moment, or even the potentiality of a hoped-for or unexpected future. The first is tinged with poetry and melancholy – specific to the painter himself? – and the artist therefore sprinkles his works with recurring motifs like so many precious pebbles that Roger Caillois would not have disowned. Similarly, the borrowings from art history are numerous and just as exhilarating to discover and decipher, in particular from European Romanticism and Symbolism or British Pre-Raphaelitism. The second most often defines the “here” and the “there” of the scene represented. The relationships between the characters arranged in the frame, the coincidence of poses and gestures sketched, the play of glances, the degrees of precision or imprecision, the relationships of colors, transparencies or opacities, everything is played out in a brief and sudden moment, a moment stopped and suspended, like a photographic snapshot with immediate revelation like the Polaroid where fragility combines with sensitivity. The third is more subtle and seems to belong to the viewer himself: what can I do with what is represented beyond an initial vision?; in what way does it concern me also? to continue a story from what is started?; to envisage an interpretation from what is expressed?; to invest the scene with muffled steps and to intertwine with the intimacy of the characters?; stretch this interruption of time to infinity like a slow motion capture ? ...

The essence of art is to tell stories and to tell stories to itself. In Anthony Cudahy, the stories, narratives, situations, events that he tells us and tells us, and on which we project, superimpose or merge our experiences, our dreams, our desires or our hopes, are of a disarming authenticity and vulnerability. His commitment and honesty to being an artist, to being a painter in our current world, are exemplary. However, no lesson, no message, no accomplished truth can be found there directly, as we have seen. No constraint or obligation for the gaze. The work is open, dignified and joyful, enchanted, pure and free. "Impose your luck, hold on to your happiness and go towards your risk. By looking at you, they will get used to it.", René Char told us in Rougeur des matinaux 1 . It is the incandescent dawns of painting that we are witnessing here; let us no longer fear the fury of twilight. In pursuing the poet's work: the joy of dawn is the chance given to find oneself on a path of one's own making.


Marc Donnadieu


1 Redness of the Morning People , in René Char, Les Matinaux , Paris, Gallimard, 1950.


Marc Donnadieu is chief curator at the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne (CH), after having been curator in charge of contemporary art at the LaM Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art in Villeneuve-d'Ascq (FR) from 2010 to 2017, and director of the Regional Contemporary Art Fund of Haute-Normandie in Sotteville-lès-Rouen (FR) from 1999 to 2010. He has curated leading monographic exhibitions (Dove Allouche, Silvia Bächli, Elina Brotherus, Philippe Cognée, Thomas Fougeirol, Jockum Nordström, Javier Pérez, Bernard Plossu, Éric Poitevin, Nancy Spero, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anne-Marie Schneider, Richard Tuttle, Luc Tuymans or Marthe Wéry...) and numerous thematic exhibitions devoted to contemporary photography, current representations of the body, identification processes within current social spaces or the relationships between art and architecture.

©2024

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