Our tour around the art galleries in Chelsea this past Wednesday was my first opportunity to explore the location’s hidden treasures, and I’m glad I was able to embark on them. Visiting and examining each gallery was amazing to me because each one was so personally revealing. I felt like every gallery was a brain and we were being invited to peer inside and observe how it thinks. All of them were special and thought-provoking to me, but my favorite works were those created by Jorge Queiroz and Nicky Nodjoumi.
Jorge Queiroz’s works had a sense of somber loneliness, self-reflection, and morbid but whimsical figures and animals. His technique is experimental and eclectic, with contrasting shapes and sizes and curious color pairings. I especially loved the sculpture room; it felt like entering a bright carpeted playhouse full of huge and unexpected pieces. He incorporated so many small surprises both in his sculptural pieces and paintings that really peaked my interest and made me feel as if he has a difficult time parting ways with lingering childhood memories. My favorite pieces from the exhibit, however, were the large and colorful paintings in the back rooms. I felt so engulfed in the imaginative worlds he created; one minute I was swimming along in a decrepit blue mass of mutated creatures and broken industrial castles and the next minute I was floating in a black and cream linear butterfly cage. In this sense, I felt connected to Queiroz’s paintings in that he captured the part of human nature that knows no bounds to creativity.
The common slicing and switching of body parts within his paintings are particularly striking; they made me believe that perhaps what his focus might have been– war, corruption, suffering, deception– was interchangeable on both sides of the spectrum, be it the victims or the perpetrators. Parts of his paintings, like the veiled women and the usage of cows, showed Nodjoumi was speaking about Iranian issues, but much of it was left to the viewer’s interpretation of their society and its problems. My favorite work of the exhibit was the painting across from front desk, mainly because it was so disturbing and powerful. The bright colors mixed with dark shadows and the tangle of syringe wires on the body of an upside down human/cow made me feel so uneasy and worried. Nodjoumi’s art fits under a category I keep in my mind when I evaluate whether or not I enjoy certain art works; when a piece has the ability of physically changing my emotional state or making me dwell long after I’ve left the location, I consider its purpose accomplished. The only regret I have about viewing Nodjoumi’s work in Chelsea is that I don’t think I was fully focused on it since my head was swarming with all of the other artists’ work we had seen previously in the day. I’m certain I’ll be returning to Invitation to Change Your Metaphor sometime soon to further absorb the paintings and analyze them better.
