Dual Natures
October 12 – December 17, 2023
Join us in celebrating TINT’s fall show “Dual Natures” and our gallery’s 2nd Year Anniversary!
Sculptor Marie Barthès, based in Paris, France, and painter Magaly Sánchez, from Lima, Peru, express the dualities they find in nature through their respective media. Order and disorder, softness and roughness, the manmade and the natural. All stems from the smallest cells. Starting from the same themes and observations, Barthès’ and Sánchez’s works diverge from there, ultimately expressing their individual natures as artists, in TINT’s fall exhibition “Dual Natures.”
Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 12
6:00 – 8:00pm
TINT Gallery
149 Gough Street
SF. CA. 94102
https://www.thetintgallery.com/
Read More about the Exhibition:
Barthès’ passion stems from observation. Her inspired worlds are those of the abyss, little creatures, grains, particles, and cells. Barthès is continually fascinated by the multiplication of forms, rhythms, order and disorder that can be found in each parcel of life. There is a duality to the leather Barthès works with. It is supple and sensual, making it ideal for round and random forms; it is soft to the touch. In such cases, Barthès pairs the leather with gold leaf, with hot-embossed gold, with woven copper threads, and colorful tassels. But leather is also rough and can be resistant. In these instances, one is forced to follow the natural veins of the leather. The techniques Barthès employs are also rougher, using scalpels, soldering irons, metal wheels to imprint patterns on the leather. In both cases, Barthès’ goal is to highlight the natural beauty of the leather.
Sánchez’s works combine geometry and nature to produce clean and orderly figurative works that end up, consciously or unconsciously, reproducing in an “invisible” way, the geometric order. Sánchez’s world of plants, leaves, and flowers, inhabit a dense landscape of bright colors and sensual motifs. Sánchez combines these natural figurative settings with stripes and other geometric shapes. While seemingly at odds with each other, the geometric and the natural work in perfect collaboration in Sánchez’s work, as they highlight the scientific origin of all things. Everything stems from the smallest microbes; the totality of Sánchez imagery emphasizes that both manmade geometric structures, as well as every detail of natural life, from a plant, down to how its leaves fall around its stem, depend on fractality. Fractality, for Sánchez, is a way of seeing order and structure in everything.
Using traditional tools that date back to XVIII century furniture making, Barthès creates works that are hybrids, part sculpture, part object, somewhere between art and function. Mirrors are more than a simple reflection of the person who stands in front of it. They multiply forms and deform them; they reflect our faces, the places we inhabit; they fall in between function and art. Barthès envelops mirrors in leather that tell a different story to each observer. Depending on a person’s mood, they might see the softness of the leather, or a violence in its etchings, a satisfaction, or a failure. Each work is unique and open to interpretation.
All of Sánchez’s works, whether evidently or more obscurely, inspire contemplation of order. Geometry exists in nature as well as in the manmade world and indeed in humanity’s own biology. Sánchez finds awe in this pervasive order, which seems infinite, eternal, and mysterious.
