Eclipsing the Occult  @Spring Break Art Fair, NYC, 2024

Curated by Francesca Arcilesi and Norma Homberg 

Artists on View: India Evans and Vincent Arcilesi (1932 - 2022).

AHA Fine Art is pleased to announce its participation in the Spring Break Art Fair on 75 Varick Street, Room 60, New York, NY 10013.  A two person installation including work by New York City artists, India Evans and Vincent Arcilesi (1932 - 2022) will be on view September 4th - 9th, 2024. Both Arcilesi and Evans bring the uncanny, the deceptively familiar and the unknown to the unflinching gaze of the viewer in Eclipsing the Occult by surveying a range of juxtaposed imagery. Buildings and their interiors, landscapes, animals, and urban forms merge and explode from the picture plane: transcending institutionally defined religious or sacred places.

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Approximately six pieces by both artists will inhabit a dimmed blue hued room with spotlights mimicking gothic arches and lighting the paintings- a nod to the interior/exterior theme of the fair and the confusion of Art Deco dreamscapes such as the film set of ‘Metropolis.’ A pair of clergy chairs sit in the middle of the room, further heightening the dissonance and psychological tension of this explosive interior space.

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In Arcilesi’s Papal Vision (right), the artist presents a Utopian glimpse of desires and dreams by comparing industrial, pastoral and tectonic landscapes with a towering and evocative nude. A puffy cloud hovers like a miraculous vision over a numinous landscape. Arcilesi paints himself in religious clothing, symbolizing a potent inner struggle with religion and the respect for the nuns that nurtured his artistic talents while at a Catholic boys’ school/orphanage. The alluring nude in the forefront is representative of Arcilesi breaking free from his fears, painting the nude body not with religious connections but rather for beauty and pleasure.  Philosopher Rudolf Otto stated about the meaning of numinous that, this mental state "presents itself as ganz Andere, wholly other, a condition absolutely sui generis and incomparable whereby the human being finds himself utterly abashed."  The series of paintings acting as a cathartic dream working through feelings of shame and being able to see outside of himself to transcend to the next artistic level of painting, thus speaking to the internal processing emerging in the precise placement of the composition on the picture plane.

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As in Love Your Sake (left), Evans combines typography and hybrid erotic beings. Her work incorporates fireflies, bees, snakes, and deer with patterned interiors that recess into geometric perspectives formed by intersecting lines, combined with enigmatic and intriguing dreams of sexual pleasures forming sensations evoked by her figures on both the interior and exterior. 

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The sense of open and closed, inside and out are shifted and re-oriented, skews the viewer’s vision as they seek to make sense of the dizzying composition. Author John Strausbaugh poetically writes of Evans, “Her images are tactile and layered, three-dimensional -- or maybe four, since time plays such a large hand in them. The lyrical language fragments she stitches into them can be like obscure inscriptions on broken monuments that occlude as much as they reveal. Maybe it's a dream language, at once surreal and familiar,...holding keys to hidden mysteries. A young woman opens her legs at the center of a pattern that looks ancient and powerful, like a net of ley lines, or tribal tattoos. It seems an image of pure sex magic, but the inscription adds another dimension of meaning: my heart is the secret the universe is telling.” 
 
The varied alluring, isolated and sometimes fierce figures depicted in both artists' work permeates their layered compositions as vivid tones swirl and alternately tempt and menace the viewer,  implicating them in the psychological imprint, the tug of war between hidden and revealed, bearing them forth into the rendez-vous. Both artists lead the eye along the lines, hallways, backgrounds, foregrounds, transcending from passionate explorations of the interior bubbling up to exterior surfaces in their collages and paintings. Eclipsing the Occult beckons the viewer to examine their own inner turmoil and come to peace within themselves and their outer surroundings.

For more information/visuals please contact Francesca Arcilesi & Norma Homberg at info@ahafineart.com.