Carbonara Sunrise

THERESA DADDEZIO

FEBRUARY 16 – MARCH 24, 2019
OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 6–9pm
Catalogue available, featuring an essay by Paul Corio.

Transmitter is pleased to present New York-based artist Theresa Daddezio's debut solo exhibition, Carbonara Sunrise. Banding is a familiar motif in the world of design and architecture and has been for millennia; it therefore doesn’t require a great leap to see it in another context apart from providing proof that a canvas’s surface is two-dimensional. This still, however, doesn’t solve the problem of the conditioned response from many, both pro and con, to the historical role of the stripe in modernist painting. But Daddezio, rather than using bands to provide documentary evidence of flatness, uses them to present the sensuous depiction of volume – fleshy, squishy, snaky, and very playful. The feminine looms large but doesn’t transform into subject; suggestions about the biological and reproductive appear as hints and allusions.

It’s tempting to draw a less-than-obvious kinship between Daddezio and another artist who set out to subvert the modernist stripe: Daniel Buren’s banding is insistent, suggests the photomechanical in its obsessive repetition, and is only nominally aesthetic. But that comparison breaks down sharply and obviously in two aspects: in Daddezio’s paintings, the mechanistic reading, while clearly present, is immediately undermined by the evidence of the artist’s touch – the long lines are rendered by hand, and there is an obvious enthusiasm for the tactility and materiality that is the special jurisdiction of oil paint. And the more significant divergence from Buren (and Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis) is the methodology with which Daddezio uses the bands to articulate her signature tube forms. At the apex of the depicted volumes, alternating bands of contrasting high key colors hum and buzz in opposition to one another, setting those areas into vibrating motion and creating the illusion that her tubes are lit from inside. As they move away from the center, color contrast gradually decreases. This shift from saturated dissonance to low contrast consonance presents a novel take on the time-honored practice of modeling in painting.

Theresa Daddezio is an artist and curator located in Queens, NY. She received her MFA from Hunter College with a concentration in painting in 2018. Her work has recently been published in MAAKE Mag, Coastal Post, and for the Wassaic Residency Project in upstate NY. Exhibitions include Three: Beverly Acha, Theresa Daddezio, Jim Gaylord at DC Moore, NY, NY; Known: Unknown at the New York Studio School; NY, NY, Abstraction in the 21st Century at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and Rhythms, Repetitions, Redundancies, a solo exhibition in Itoshima, Japan. Her work has been covered by Hyperallergic, The Queens Ledger, Bushwick Daily, and the L Magazine.