The artist’s portraits of young children highlight the attention to detail, composition and color that characterize much of classical painting. In fact, she is a painter by training -influenced by Old Masters such as Diego Velázquez, Agnolo Bronzino, Philipp Otto Runge, Francisco Goya- and is now employing digital photography to create portraiture. Lux imperceptibly manipulates her photographic images, creating a bewildering space that seduces the viewer to explore every inch of the surface.

In the pastel-colored photographs, her flawless, pale doll-like subjects are dressed in vintage period clothing, and inhabit what seems to be a dreamlike world. Her apparent hyper-perfection is met with a harmony, and demands deeper investigation by causing an uncomfortable state of wonder. In the estranged context of the photographs, her uncanny figures are isolated, as if not capable of establishing a relationship with the viewer.

Born in 1969 in Dresden, Germany, Loretta Lux studied painting in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, from 1990 to 1996. Various solo exhibitions of her work were held in New York at Yossi Milo Gallery, in The Hague at the Hague Museum of Photography, and in Amsterdam at Torch Gallery. She received the Bayerischer Kunst foerderpreis in 2002 and The International Centre of Photography’s Infinity Award for Art in 2005.

Loretta Lux, Photographs, galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan, September 9th-October 31st 2010

Acaso features a series of photographs which are the result of a four-year project by fashion photographer Javier Vallhonrat. The images largely differ from the hip and glossy fashion-related work he often realized for publications such as Vogue and the New York Times.

The works exhibited at the Galleria Carla Sozzani -located at 10 Corso Como in Milan- explore the ways in which we tend to interact with, and transform, space in order to give shape to something, such as a house or a building, which we can occupy as inhabitants. The images prove to question the meaning of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘home’ as sites around which we construct our experience, our individual memory and our identity, while at the same time trying to make sense of an unfamiliar condition such as the absence of what might be a ‘safe’ place we recognize as ours and which we can refer to. Vallhonrat seems to invite the viewer to come to terms with a re-definition of a perception of space that moves from being abstract to becoming real and concrete, a process which highlights the interplay between nature and man. Privileging shades of grey, green and blue, the images by the Spanish photographer depict a variety of tasks performed by male characters within a landscape setting, and although the photographs suggest that some kind of action is taking place, the overall impression they deliver is one of extreme stillness and solitude.

Born in Madrid, Spain, in 1953, fashion photographer Javier Vallhonrat studied Painting at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Madrid in the early 1970’s. He achieved international recognition soon after receiving his Fine Arts degree, while shooting for the Condé Nast Publications. In 1992 he started working on advertising films, while teaching photography at the same time. He has also worked for various international fashion designers, such as Comme des Garçons, Christian Lacroix, Jil Sander, Martine Sitbon, Yves Saint-Laurent, Chloé, and John Galliano.

Acaso will be on view at Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan from 18th October to 22nd November 2009.

Curated by Filippo Trevisani, Stefano Arienti’s exhibition “Arte In-Percettibile” at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (Septemebr 9, 2009 – January 6, 2010) is a survey of around 15 installation works, some of which were conceived specifically for this show. Arranged to establish a close relationship, and interaction between works and viewers, the exhibition mirrors the challenging process of research and experimentation that is typical of Arienti’s eclectic production. The artist’s work is characterized by the use of everyday materials found in our surroundings. In fact, wandering through the show, it is inevitable to detect the unexpected energy and charm of apparently simple and ordinary found objects. He certainly owes a lot to arte povera and its fascination with materials that are humble, impoverished, and often organic such as natural stone pebbles, glass pebbles, old magazines and newspapers. Placing a large emphasis on paper, Arieti transforms it, recycles it, plays with its texture, and analyzes its properties. Ignoring formal limitations, he takes paper, he cuts it, bends it, de-constructs it.

Through his meticulous manipulation of a variety of materials, Arienti confers the most common resources a poetic dimension, as well as exploring and questioning the art-making process and the manner in which art is intended and perceived. Arienti’s passion and obsession is to collect the most diverse materials and objects and create subtle and seductive treasures, deliberately investigating the relationship between art and life.

Stefano Arienti was born in Asola (Mantua) in 1961 and lives and works in Milan. He has been working with the contemporary art gallery Studio Guenzani in Milan since the end of the 1980s. Since then, he has shown his works extensively in Italy and internationally, in both group and solo shows. In 2005, a major retrospective of Arienti’s work was held at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. He has also been featured in the Milano Europa 2000 exhibition in 2000, the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, the Instanbul Biennale in 1992, and the Rome Quadrenniale in 1996.

John Wesley’s engaging retrospective is taking place at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale, and will be on view until October 4th. The project, which is curated by Italian curator Germano Celant for the Fondazione Prada, features more than 150 works from 1961 to 2007.

John Wesley distinguishes himself for his highly recognizable style characterized by simple tracings, flat areas of color, and the use of a palette dominated by pastel-like colors. Light blue tones and a decorative yet sensuous pink seem to be his favorites. Poster-like, flat, colorful and figurative, Wesley’s paintings are a masterful fusion of tradition and pop cultural references. The linear technique, the essential painterly effects, and the often schematic format, all contribute to cartoons and comic strip appearance of Wesley’s work.

Associated with Pop Art, reductionism, Surrealism, Art Nouveau, as well as artists such as Matisse, Wesley also incorporates clues from popular culture and Japanese iconography and mixes humor and sex in a way which is unpredictable, seductive and poetic. Delightfully painterly, his unique and compelling compositions present a variety of female and male characters, pretty human faces, naked bodies, details of lips, legs and thighs, animals, comic book characters, all populating a narrative that loops between the dreamy-like imagery of the unconscious and contemporary culture. Glamorous and irresistibly appealing, the works on show in Venice certainly bolster Wesley’s position as one of America’s most significant artists.

John Wesley was born Los Angeles, California, in 1928. He has no formal art training, and after holding various jobs, he began painting at the age of 22. In 1960 he left his native Los Angeles to move to New York city, where he met many artists of the time–among them, Donald Judd, who soon became a friend and supporter. He started exhibiting his work at the Robert Elkon Gallery in 1963. The current retrospective at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice is Wesley’s second major solo show after the one held at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York city in 2000. He currently lives and works in New York city.

Currently on view at Primo Marella Gallery in Milan, Singing Stars is a solo exhibition dedicated to young Chinese artist Gao Yu. Exhibiting outside of Asia for the first time, Gao Yu introduces us to a series of mixed-media works that represent some of the successful contemporary art from super modern China. 28-year-old Gao Yu exploits a cartoon-like imagery, and thus confirms the challenge brought by animation as an autonomous art form. He draws on ideas and forms from pop and teenage culture, comics, and fiction, offering a vivacious and at the same time bizarre reinterpretation of traditional Chinese icons. The artist’s characters–his favorite apparently being the panda and the lunar rabbit–inhabit a surreal, almost psychedelic place which is rendered through the application of distinct, and often resonant, acrylic colors. The works are indeed playful, vibrant and beautifully cheeky, but sometimes there is also a disturbing and grotesquely sinister halo to the innocent looking cartoon figures. It is precisely this combination of innocence and wickedness that takes the viewers to the realm of Japanese comic and animation–manga and anime–which Gao Yu obviously riffs on. And, as manga and anime inspired works from Japan have affirmed themselves in mainstream contemporary art–with Yoshitomo Nara, “pop art star” Takashi Murakami, but also Kaikai Kiki‘s Chiho Aoshima and Aya Takano among others–Gao Yu has everything he needs to remain a top representative of the Chinese art circuit.

Born in Guizohou, China, in 1981, and currently living and working in Chongqing, Gao Yu graduated from Sichuan Fine Art Institute in 2003. With Chen Ke, Zhang Hui, Wei Jia, Han Yajuan, and Feng Zhengquan, Gao Yu is one of the most important members of the “cartoon generation”, a group of young artists who debuted with a show titled “A Cartoon Generation”, held in Beijing in 2005, and who are associated with the dynamic contemporary art scene of China.

Singing Stars will be on view at Primo Marella Gallery from April 4th 2009-May 23rd 2009.

Milan’s Carla Sozzani hip gallery at 10 Corso Como is currently celebrating Guy Bourdin‘s provocative, masterful photography. The exhibition includes the section A Message for You, which presents a series of photographs dating back mainly to the 1970’s, and Unseen, showing works from the artist’s own archive. Seductive, glossy, sometimes disturbing and doubtlessly radical, Bourdin’s works are a perverse and superb aesthetization of recurrent themes such as death, desire, and sex. Suicide, murder, pleasure and pain, but also decadence, glamor and a quest for perfection, are the components that define most of the images. Inspired by Surrealism and its fascination for transgression, the irrational and the uncanny, Bourdin envisions fantastic plots that make his fashion photography look delightfully attractive and impenetrable. He definitely succeeds in combining ground-breaking commercial campaigns and fashion advertising with his dark, gloomy, and even perverse modality of vision. He also seems to be well aware of the fact that it’s not the fashion item per se but the image to attract us as viewers, and this probably explains why we cannot help but be intrigued, if not utterly captured, by the beauty of his greatly charged images. What is apparent is that each one of his photographs is not a simple medium subjected to presenting a product but becomes a place where Bourdin the artist asserts his idea of photography as art.

Born in Paris in 1928, Guy Bourdin is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of fashion and advertising of the 20th century. Influenced by the well-known Surrealist photographer Man Ray, and by the work of many other Surrealists like Magritte and Balthus, Bourdin worked for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and shot a variety of advertising campaigns for many fashion designers such as Chanel, Ungaro and Versace. He died of cancer in Paris in 1991. His first retrospective was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2003.

On view until March 19th, Gio Marconi gallery in Milan is presenting a series of large-scale printed works by American artist Wade Guyton. Displayed in the ground floor area of the gallery, Guyton’s elegant Xs and stripes are an emblematic manifestation of the concept of mechanical reproduction within the art-making process. Guyton’s ‘paintings’ are produced by printing and re-printing the same digital file drawn by the artist in Photoshop on pieces of folded, oversize, pre-primed linen, first on one side, and then on the other. Focusing attention on the medium is definitely characteristic of Guyton’s ‘paintings’. Each one, bearing marks of its somewhat ‘forced’ making process, becomes a visual record of the action of the forty-four inch wide Epson 9600 Ultrachrome inkjet printer used by the artist. The works should not merely be regarded as finished artifacts but as physical traces of a conceptual operation, and as records of the process of their production: the central, vertical line, or seam, shows exactly where the linen was accurately folded to pass through the printer. A reference to 20th century art history and American abstract expressionism is more or less detectable in the exploitation of the medium. Just as the action painters of the mid-20th century relied on the physical act of painting and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint onto the canvas, Guyton turns to a device to transfer his ‘paintings’ from a computer onto primed linen, letting the medium decide.

Currently living and working in New York City, Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, and received a B.A. from the University of Tennessee in 1995 and his MFA from Hunter College in 1998. He has recently exhibited with solo shows at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, at Portikus in Frankfurt and at LAXART in Los Angeles. Represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York, his works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Mamco (Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain) in Geneva.