BALLOONS UMBRELLAS TURTABLES, 2004 [Enlarge in New Window]

Rafael Sánchez: Balloons Umbrellas Turntables

PRESS RELEASE:
From September 12 - October 10 PARTICIPANT INC presents BALLOONS UMBRELLAS TURNTABLES, an exhibition by visual and performing artist Rafael Sánchez. BALLOONS UMBRELLAS TURNTABLES is the ambitious continuation of Sánchez’s exploration of androgyny, allegory, and archetypal themes such as love and jealousy. Incorporating the far-reaching influences of Greek tragedy, alchemical illustration, Surrealist theater, silent films, drag shows, and rock and roll music as inspiration for the elaboration of rich theatrical performances. Sánchez fully integrates his performance-based work into a gallery installation for the opening of PARTICIPANT INC’s third season.

BALLOONS UMBRELLAS TURNTABLES transforms PARTICIPANT INC with drawings, paintings, and performing objects that exist as fully evolved works, as well as studied research for props, costumes, and set designs. A stage constructed as the centerpiece of the exhibition, together with sculptural objects throughout the space, will be activated by serial performances inaugurated at the opening of the exhibition and continuing throughout its run. The installation articulates a theatrical confluence of diverse materials and doubles as a working area where he and numerous collaborators will develop a series of visually driven performances, presented in working form throughout the exhibition and in finished theatrical form as REVOLVER, with performances on October 8, 9 and 10, 2004.

Balloons, umbrellas, and turntables... elements found throughout Sánchez’s twenty-year multidisciplinary career, thematically structure his investigations of gravity, transformation, time, the body, nature, culture, the cosmos and deliver forms born of focused exploration and play. For the performances the gallery will be rigged to activate over 1000 black balloons; umbrellas will be featured costume/prop devices; and sound will be mixed live on turntables. Two discreet series of works visually anchor and comprise the exhibition. One a group of recent paintings based on Sánchez’s theatrical studies, and the other a series of four drawings inspired by the early projects of singer Freddie Mercury. Each series serves to further outline deeply explored themes that have long been sources of Sánchez’s visual and performance work.

The new series of paintings is derived from Sánchez’s vast archive of character sketches, costume designs, storyboards, and makes reference to the Symbolist vocabulary of the late 19th century, specifically the work of Odilon Redon. Rendered his particular mix of application colors on fades of black, Sánchez’s palette includes foundation make-up, chroma-key and digital blue, orange antirouille, and phosphorescent paint, among other colors derived from specific material functions. The image of the balloon appears numerous times in Redon’s macabre charcoal drawings, and provides a reference for Sánchez’s atmospheric constructions using black balloons, both spooky and playful. Redon’s paintings represent ambiguous worlds, nocturnal and fantastical, that are drawn from the landscapes of dreams, mythology and mysticism. In this work, Sánchez furthers his ideological interest in materials and subject matter that are similarly outside of specific trends and movements.

In 1999 Sánchez presented a two-act masque play titled The Libation Bearers; the Opera that featured fifteen selections from the early pre-pop, mid-seventies, no-synthesizers metal period of the band Queen. The Libation Bearers was a fully lip-synched reinterpretation of Aeschylus‚ tale of the same name, reconstructed using the Queen songs. The two-week run drew audiences from interested in art, theater, and club performance. At the studio, in the wake of The Libation Bearers, he began four drawings, each rendered with great care to resemble the airbrushed look of mid-seventies album cover art and drawn in a standard ballpoint pen color (blue, red, black, and green). Each drawing represents one of the four bands that Mercury performed with prior to Queen: The Hectics, Ibex, Wreckage, and Sour Milk Sea.

Sánchez’s first professional experience with performance was as an intern on the set of Robert Whitman’s Eclipse in 1983, in which theatrical and film techniques were used to express a kinship between physical phenomena and emotional states through a time-based sculptural approach. Sánchez began creating sets for drag shows in the late eighties, and eventually began performing his own. With the emergence of androgynous characters, diverse aspects of his work in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and set design began to crystallize in atmospheric tableaux, merging spectacle and substance.

Rafael is a Cuban born multimedia artist living and working in New York City.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | Fantasy & Myth | New York | 2002