Ramsey Dau | The Singularity is Near | Opening Reception with Artist

LOS ANGELES - Sept. 7, 2015 - PRLog -- Ramsey Dau | The Singularity is Near

September 12 – October 31, 2015

Opening Reception with Artist in Attendance: September 12, 6-8pm

KM FINE ARTS | LOS ANGELES

LOS ANGELES, CA (September 7, 2015) - KM Fine Arts is pleased to announce The Singularity is Near, a solo exhibition of new hyperrealist paintings by Ramsey Dau, on view from September 12, 2015 – October 31, 2015 at the gallery’s West Hollywood location at 814 N. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90069. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 12, from 6-8pm with the artist in attendance. A catalog will accompany the exhibition and features essays by Peter Frank and Carlos Rivera. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An in-studio video interview with Peter Frank will be released on www.artists1on1.com in tandem with the exhibition.

Ramsey Dau’s carefully articulated compositions, guided by intuitive special awareness and his subconscious mind, are masterfully rendered investigations of human awareness. Each dynamic composition acts a playful interplay between concept and technique; simple and complex; and conscious and subconscious decision-making.

Collage aesthetic is highly present in Dau’s work-- he embraces the careful choreography available to the collage medium and repurposes it in a playful, mimicking way. At first glance his work may be mistaken for an actual collage, complete with tape and torn paper. However, Dau has intentionally removed himself from this method that is sometimes hasty and haphazard. Dau instead slows the collage process down by painting, in trompe-l'œil fashion, each element that appears to be adhered to the work. Peter Frank aptly states that “this, combined with the tender, almost old-master precision of his painterly craft, gives Dau’s art a poignancy that outweighs the sly irony involved in painting pictures of paper.”

Through utilizing collage logic, Dau is able to unite seemingly disjointed elements to create works that are intensely cerebral and offer reveal new realities. Art-historical images of tribal African sculpture and wares populate this new body of work, as do bold graphic patterns and expressionistic marks. Text is often included in his work, and is typically gleaned from his readings of existential philosophers and neuroscientists such as Immanuel Kant, Bertrand Russell, or Oliver Sacks. Combined, these elements, floated on grey-white backgrounds, induce a sense of intuitive familiarity: a déjà -vu of sorts, or feeling of remembering the future.

Ambiguity is an intentional and essential element in Dau’s painting process; contrived works that speak to a specific meaning are of no interest to him creatively or intellectually. His work instead­ serves as a minimalist roadmap to the subconscious mind. As a powerfully curious person, Dau is more interested in the meaning that is ascribed to the work through investigation of the subconscious. Carlos Rivera explains, “In Dau’s world, our frenetic attention spans are not permanently fractured. He hypothesizes that we are still capable of extended periods of thought, and separating the good ambiguity from the bad”. To view his work is to embark on a mental archeological dig: through focused effort and time a meaning will slowly come into focus.