PEANA is pleased to announce Dahlia,an exhibition of five new oil paintings by artist Max Xeno Karnig.
Painted on copper panels, Karnig applies the compositional logic and formal precision of the Old Masters to contemporary subjects drawn mostly from cinema, daily observations from life, or typically a combination of the two. In doing so, Karnig creates a productive tension between the painting techniques and spatial logic of the past and the decidedly modern content they now contain. A portrait adapted from Michelangelo Antonioni's 1961 film La Notte, for example, sits alongside still lifes of fruit and flowers from a local farmer's market; a small nude derives its proportions and compositional framework from 15th and 16th century paintings of religious tableaux, yet the subject is recast with a figure drawn from life. The paintings hold subjects at a formal distance, elevating them through meticulous brushwork, carefully modulated color, and the play of light, while maintaining an underlying wit about their sources and the act of painting itself.