TRACES: GROUP EXHIBITION
Ali Eckert | Hyacinthe Ouattara | Michael Dell
JAN 31 - APR 12, 2025 | OPENING JAN 30, 2025
Ronewa Art Projects is pleased to begin its 2025 exhibition program with the group exhibition Traces. Opening with a public reception on January 30 at 18:00, Traces brings together an array of mediums and techniques by artists Ali Eckert (Germany/USA), Hyacinthe Ouattara (Burkina Faso/France), and Michael Dell (New Zealand). All three artists have an artistic practice driven by process, each having developed a characteristic method of layering their materials to explore and probe what is visible, what is unseen, and what is contained in the remnants.
Ali Eckert
The work of Ali Eckert resides in the murky and contradictory space between nostalgia and disillusionment. Through a combination of photography, digital image editing, analog printing manipulations, and textured painting techniques, Eckert creates works that reference American pop culture and dwell on notions of the American Dream. Eckert draws from ubiquitous cultural symbols, recognizable to many from American films, and creates highly saturated cinematic imagery that is both hyper-realistic and distinctly fabricated. The works presented in Traces belong to Eckert’s series of works on canvas, ‘Skinned Bottles’ and ‘Vanishing Icons.’ He depicts everyday objects – a Coke can, an ice machine, a payphone – as distorted, faded, and decaying artifacts of an era. All of Eckert’s work is created from the standpoint of his dual American-German identity and influenced by a background in advertising and filmmaking. Eckert’s works lament the dream this iconography once represented, while reflecting on an ongoing cultural transition from his unique vantage point.
HYACINTHE OUATTARA
Hyacinthe Ouattara, Fragility I, 2024, Crochet, ink on fabric, ribbons, nails and cotton threads, 70 x 58 cm. 27 1/2 x 22 7/8 in.
The traces in Hyacinthe Ouattara’s vibrant and intricate textile works are the ties to place, history, and identity embedded in his found materials. By sewing and patchworking together fabrics, threads, clothing, and home textiles, Ouattara creates composite sculptural objects that contain multiple histories and associations and contemplate ideas of intimacy, memory, and individual and collective identities. He describes his artistic exploration as a “quest for elsewhere,” repurposing fabric and clothing with past lives that give them a particular emotional charge. Ronewa presents two new textile wall hangings from Ouattara’s ‘Fragility’ series, which continues this exploration through found textiles and introduces vivid indigo blue, derived from indigo pigments from his hometown Diébougou in Burkina Faso. “The indigo tree is the image of a fragile and unstable world,” writes Ouattara, “a reminder of the fragile permanence of life.” For Ouattara, his practice is a meditation on the ambivalence of life and the human experience, oscillating between stability and perpetual motion, the tangible and intangible, and the perceived and the unknown.
Michael Dell
Michael Dell, Ngāti, 2024, Charcoal and contè on Arches 640gm paper, 76 x 57 cm, 29 7/8 x 22 1/2 in. Photo by Jeremy Knowles.
New Zealand artist Michael Dell references cinema to an entirely different end. For his series of abstract drawings, ‘Distant Pictures,’ Dell extracts his color palettes from the opening scenes of films from the New Zealand cinema canon and creates soft and hazy color gradient images that are distinctly devoid of narrative. Dell gradually builds up his delicately blended gradients by adding and subtracting layer after layer of charcoal and conté on paper or acrylic on linen canvas. Subtle lines, irregularities, and surface textures emerge through the process. The blurred black borders that frame Dell’s gradients are reminiscent of old celluloid film prints, containing within them an almost ghostly abstract space full of remnants of erased layers. Presented alongside the highly associative and tactile mixed media works by Eckert and Ouattara, the pure abstraction of Dell’s works holds a magnetic tension.
