"Synthetica"
Carol Peligian
Bill Albertini
Richard Paul
May 9 – June 14, 2025
Opening reception Friday May 9, 6-8 pm
Gallery hours Thursday-Saturday 12-6 pm
Theodore is pleased to present Synthetica, an exhibition of work that synthesizes the future through the nuance of anachronistic aesthetics. Forms, images, materials – the work may echo the known canon in some way, but the final presence of the work suggests a glitch in the time and space continuum. The simultaneity of the familiar and the anomalous both attract and baffle. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” the planet at the center of the plot manifests people and places from deep inside the subconscious minds of the ship’s crew. Whether these manifestations are true embodiments of memories or synthetic recreations, does it matter if the satisfaction achieved is the same?
Peligian employs invented and traditional materials in an ongoing exploration of the human body and its relationship to the world. Objects and images are charged with energy and previously unseen, yet feel familiar. Works from several series are made from radically different materials — from transparent film and powdered pigments applied to corrugated aluminum, to rolled and painted aluminum wall sculptures. Each material, chosen for its physical properties and associative resonances, acts as a conduit between the tangible and the ephemeral.
Through the deliberate fusion of ideas and materials, the works call attention to surfaces and the elasticity of meaning offering the viewer an opening to pause. In this space of suspension, viewers are invited to project their own interpretations, and emotions, engaging in a dialogue that extends beyond the physical object into an intimate, subjective encounter. The work resists easy categorization, instead embracing a range of media, forms, ideas and expressions and allowing for both tension and resolution as these multitudes collide.
New York-based artist Carol Peligian was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work employs familiar forms - paintings, drawings, sculptures and video - which she augments with new invented materials and unique tools to concentrate on a subject beyond our experience. Her works have been shown at Sue Scott Gallery, FALSE FLAG Gallery, The Museum of Biblical Art, the Guild Hall Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, as well as NADA, and are in collections such as The Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin and Marshall College and Mohegan Sun Corporate Art Collection. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Bill Albertini’s Pipe Dream System series, started in 2017, continues with new wall-mounted works. These new sculptural pieces revisit his use of decorative architectural elements which reference earlier works from the late 1980s. Albertini’s Bankers Box Stacks also draw on motifs from his 1980s oeuvre, a set of 5 ambiguous symbols that could represent an imaginary state or religion. The manufacturer Bankers Box makes the ubiquitous file and document storage boxes sometimes seen being carried by FBI agents removing evidence. They have also been used to store unsecured secret documents.
Bill Albertini is a graduate of the Crawford College of Art, Cork, Ireland (1978) and the Yale School of Art (MFA 1982). He has had solo exhibitions at, amongst others, Martos Gallery, New York; Alona Kagan Gallery, New York; Temple Bar Galleries and Studios, Dublin; Althea Viafora Gallery, New York; and White Columns, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe, including recent shows at the Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects, New York; LMAK Projects, New York; Theodore:Art, Brooklyn; Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland; Digital Vision at Grinnell College Museum of Art (2022); and VSOP Projects, Greenport NY. Albertini lives and works in New York.
Richard Paul uses a variety of visual tools and photographic technology to collect, disassemble, and create new incarnations of fragments from his experience of the cultural spectrum. His role is less that of a visionary and more of a stenographer, listening to the murmurs of AI and feeding them back in, trying to trip the system, and coax it into conjuring something strange—something that lingers in the half-light between dreaming and waking. Paul considers these works as relics from a future-past, excavated from a dimension where physiognomy follows rules adjacent to, but not the same as, our own. The lineage is erratic, crooked: his own concrete sculptures, ancient Sumerian votive figures, Francis Picabia’s Monster Series, but not Mr. Potato Head. When translated into 3D, the image gains an alibi—or perhaps just a greater believability. The shift makes the strangeness more persuasive, an illusionistic argument for the impossible.
Richard Paul was born in Scotland and lives and works in London. His work is concerned with material transformation and subjective perception, recently taking the form of 3D lenticular photographs and 3D video installations. He has a BA (Hons) Drawing and Painting from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (now Dundee University), an MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and an MA Aesthetics & Art Theory from Middlesex University. He co-directed Hoxton Distillery, a gallery in East London, in the early-mid 2000s. He was commissioned by Tate St Ives to produce the 3D video A circle is a sphere seen from afar, which was screened in the gallery in January and February and July -September 2020. He has had two solo exhibitions at Theodore, curated the exhibition Joy before the object at Seventeen Gallery, London, and has participated in group exhibitions internationally. Paul has also written on other artists, most recently an essay on Erin O’Keefe for her solo exhibition at Seventeen Gallery in 2020.
