Author: dig

Bernadette Despujols

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Adler Guerrier (2021), Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. 

Spinello Projects presents I Love You, Man, the debut solo gallery exhibition by Venezuelan-born artist Bernadette Despujols. The exhibition features a suite of oil paintings depicting men who are close to the artist, on view at the Gesamtkunstwerk Building located at 2930 NW 7th Avenue. A special locals-only preview reception will take place Saturday, November 20, 6-10pm. Miami Art Week vernissage will take place Tuesday, November 30, 11am-4pm. Exhibition through January 15, 2022. Free and open to the public. 

In I Love You, Man Bernadette Despujols paints the closest men in her circle. The paintings are a departure from her usual depictions of women in paintings. In previous paintings, Despujols positioned herself as the subject of her paintings although they were portraits of anonymous unconscious women sourced from pornography made by men. Holding the belief that to be a woman makes other people uncomfortable and ultimately poses a threat to men she turns her gaze and paints the cishet men in her life: friends, lovers, family. Despujols uses the portraiture of her male subjects to experience her relationships with deeper intimacy. Objectification and intersubjectivity (the relation or intersection between people’s cognitive perspectives) ebbs and flows between the painter and the painted. She objectifies the men in the paintings at times, focusing solely on one body part or their bare skin and bodies, but the men pose for the pictures with awareness and dignity. Nothing is stolen from them; Despujols may want to position these men ironically as muses but the truth is she defeats the irony of it with pure affinity and care towards the people she paints, leaving the men to decide what they want to wear and show of themselves. In the act of portraiture she experiences the vulnerability of these men through their quiet shyness or awkwardness with themselves, ways that would otherwise challenge the presumed status quo of manhood: tough, aggressive, aloof, qualities of patriarchy that, to Despujols, imprison both men and women in a cycle of violence. The paintings are formally infused with skewed perspectives, foreground and background foibles, and blank, paintless spaces furthering the playfulness she captures by being around the men she loves.


Available works click here

Lyric form

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Marjorie Levinson – Lyric: the Idea of This Invention, 2015. And as a chapter in Thinking Through Poetry: Field Notes on the Romantic Lyric (Oxford University Press, 2018). 330 pp. (Hdbk., $82; ISBN 9780198810315). A review.

About her project, Professor Levinson writes:


“Borrowing frameworks from one discipline for use in another” is how Jonathan Culler describes one of theory’s traditional agendas and it gives a good general account of my procedures in this essay. Although the frameworks I borrow come from several disciplines (e.g., neurophysiology, post-classical physics, evolutionary biology, 19th-c morphology, developmental systems theory), they share a common paradigm (self-organization) and a common process (recursion). That paradigm and that process are the connect with lyric form, one of my core topics. The other topic is method, and there too I take a leaf from the sciences, arguing for an epistemic pluralism and, more radically, an ontic pluralism as well, such that we can allow not just different kinds of explanations for different levels of study, but different kinds of objects emerging at different scales and through different techniques of inquiry and display. The validity of my contribution is therefore tied to its level of analysis, which I characterize, via Culler once again, as “theory of the middle range, or what used to be called poetics” (as distinct from “high theory” on the one hand, and “literary criticism” on the other). By adapting some modeling moves from scientific discourses that target this middle range, I hope to circumvent the tired historicist/formalist standoff, and more important, to generate language for describing deep structure effects in the absence of deep structure causes and origins.

Event announcement at Stanford.

Marjorie Levinson reviews The Calamity Form, 2020.

Viewpoints at Bakehouse Art Complex

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Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community

November 13, 2021 through March 27, 2022.

In celebration of its 35th anniversary season, Bakehouse presents Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community, a group exhibition co-curated by visual artist Edouard Duval-Carrié and Bakehouse Curatorial + Public Programs Manager, Laura Novoa. The exhibition showcases twenty-five Bakehouse artists working predominantly in two-dimensional media, including painting, drawing, print-making, and photography. Duval-Carrié and Novoa draw on recent work to examine the creative output of a community and the way its constituent artists have navigated the changes and challenges of the last year and a half.

Recognizing the organization’s long tradition of group exhibitions and considering its current and future role as a local hub for art and art-making, Viewpoints hints at the array of individual styles and affinities coexisting in a shared space and how this diversity has come to define the spirit of the artists working, producing, and communing within Bakehouse.

Participating artists include Jason Aponte, Maria Theresa Barbist, Thomas Bils, Lujan Candria, Alain Castoriano, Rose Marie Cromwell, Gabriela Gamboa, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Adler Guerrier, Gonzalo Hernandez, Monique Lazard, Rhea Leonard, Amanda Linares, Philip Lique, Nicole Maynard-Sahar, Patricia Monclus, Najja Moon, Mateo Nava, William Osorio, Christina Pettersson, Jennifer Printz, Sandra Ramos, Nicole Salcedo, Tonya Vegas, and Almaz Wilson.

Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses

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To read, via nyer https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/rebecca-solnit-on-the-politics-of-pleasure

…a natural history of gardening, a dissection of the rose as capitalist metaphor, or a defense of art and beauty as a bulwark against the annihilating forces of totalitarianism.
…pleasure as a form of resistance

roses–they became a symbol for the whole contemporary world.

Part of living in the contemporary world is knowing the conditions under which [ANYTHING & EVERYTHING]…are produced

…suggesting that meaning is inherent in materials, if you pay attention to them, and meaning is also inherent in the process of making.