The lower gallery at England&Co has got the recent work of Vito Drago, Chris Kenny and Alberto Duman.
1. Chris Kenny produces those collages held together in the air by pins. They look extremely delicate and I bet they take absolutely ages to pin down. That man must have some patience!
This time, at England&Co he has got written language pinned down. I love that it looks like a coherent text - expecially the shadow of the lines in the background.
I remember seeing Chris Kenny's work at Fred gallery last year the collage exhibition. He had maps there, doing the same thing that he did at England&Co with language: taking a fragment out of the context, alienating it from it's previous habitat, planting it into a new artificial system, where the fragment acquires new neighbors and a new meaning.
2. Vito Drago had some "mixed media on page".
He has always stressed that the books he uses and manipulates in his work are ‘non-specific’, saying that ‘it is not the message of a particular book that interests me… there is no element of interpretation’. Drago takes the perception of books being representative of ‘knowledge’ and subverts and questions the certainty of that concept through deletion and obliteration – the content is irrelevant. He asks: ‘what do we really know?’I thought his work was beautiful - there was kind of sensitivity to it. Something to contemplate about.
3. On the whole, I prefer Alberto Duman's work that was not in that gallery. And the reason for that is this: I don't like seeing the pixelation of the slated lines on the prints. I heard they are screenprints, but I assume they had been prepared on the computer and the pixels are visible. I am such an ass, but I felt cheated.
I would have preferred if the prints were letterpressed.
