The gallery is pleased to announce Puzzle Palace an exhibition of painting by Erica Baclawski, Marti Cormand, Mark Ferguson, Robert Jack and Aaron Wexler. Puzzle Palace aims to capture a moment in time, it is a snapshot and sneak preview of the current production of five young New York based artists.

The works in Puzzle Palace constantly disclose that painting is a theater of manipulated information. The artists fluctuate within the systems of abstraction and figuration to bring painting to an articulate point of self-consciousness. The works in the exhibition portray the state of precarious imbalance we live in by staging various levels of artifice, between mirror and mirage, fact and fantasy.

Erica Baclawski’s paintings explore the psychological space between landscape and the body. While indulging in the conventions of the romantic legacy of landscape imagery, her paintings draw attention to its artifice. The view is always experienced through a window; architecture is the omnipresent frame of the panorama. A cool unreal lighting amplifies a sense of disenchantment and removed sentimentality.

With oil on canvas Marti Cormand builds a visual lexicon, connecting bits of discrete information into complex networks of spheres, tubes, vessels and modules. In a simultaneous series of associations the paintings evoke the architecture of science fiction, cellular configurations and 17th Century Vanitas. Qualities of transparency, density, light, shadow and extreme precision reference the technique of Vermeer. The occurrence of repetition, compression, decompression or translation of the image sets the grounds for a world of analogies. Music on canvas where everything appears to be but nothing is.

Aaron Wexler is interested in the fine line between desire and fear, fragility and stability. His cut-paper paintings juxtapose faintly outlined images: a jumping basketball player, a giant butterfly, a floating fragment of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum… The Ghostly mat acrylic surfaces of the paintings are gently incised and peeled away to reveal playful dreamscapes of free association.

A taxonomist armed with acrylic, ink and casein, Robert Jack collects and dissects elements with meticulous care. He classifies what he doesn't understand. After focusing on drawing for the past years, he presents a new group of paintings. A painting by Robert Jack is a silent process, an osmotic and homeopathic development. Each painting is an accumulation of signals, vibrations and variations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. Every aspect of reality becomes quietly interconnected. Nothing happens in a static or isolated form.

Mark Ferguson’s retinal confections stage a toxic game. His paintings offer a concentration of information without the possibility to access it. They consist of dark backgrounds invaded by bright colored dots. In this new group, clusters of dots infiltrate the whole territory of the painting like color-coded information gone dysfunctional. The work offers an explosion of possible alternatives: a world where neither emptiness nor saturation dominates, where space and time are reconsidered for a new vocabulary to emerge.

Erica Baclawski
Born in 1976, she received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Recent group shows include Stop and Store, Luxe gallery, New York and Plastic Gardens, Cristinerose|Josee Bienvenu Gallery.

Marti Cormand
Born in Spain 1970, recently moved to New York from Barcelona where he received his MFA. Recent shows include: Sicardi Gallery, Houston, TX; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Cristinerose|Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York.

Mark Ferguson
Born in 1966, he received his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1994. Recent exhibitions include Mark Ferguson: Paintings, Cristinerose|Josee Bienvenu Gallery.

Robert Jack
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, 1971. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Systems Now, Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Madison, WI; Microwave, Sicardi Gallery, Houston TX; Almost replicating, Cristinerose|Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York.

Aaron Wexler
Born in Philadelphia in 1974, he received his M.F.A from The school of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Recent and upcoming group shows in New York include: PS122 Gallery; Lehmann Maupin; 5BE, Oliver Kamm Gallery.