Christopher Iseri

works exhibitions news about

press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Signs of Life, an exhibition of a new paintings by San Jose-based artist Christopher Iseri. Signs of Life is the artist’s third solo presentation at the gallery and will be on view from September 10, 2022 - October 22, 2022.

Furthering his material exploration of painted, cut, and sewn canvas, Christopher Iseri considers the earthbound aesthetics of space and its huge wondrousness as conduits for form and erstwhile narratives. Vast cosmic expanses compress to become approximated visions of time and mass, where frayed threads hang from planetary bodies and stellar phenomena. Using the records of their process to further his paintings’ winking engagement with their subject matter, Iseri sets up a foundational gulf between gravitationally boundedness and heavenly detachment. Order, logic, and sequence break apart, with signals from one painting appearing as transmissions in another across the exhibition. Anchored by the unstretched titular work, a repository of off-cuts from the paintings themselves, Signs of Life presents a closed system of independent but interrelated objects.

Following the artist’s previous exhibition at the gallery, in which fifty-four small canvases lined the gallery interrupted by two larger unstretched works, the works in Signs of Life take on various scales and roles within the artist’s universe. Confusing the notion of space as nearly inconceivable in its boundlessness, Iseri offers views of stardust, black holes, galaxies, and perhaps even space craft at varying scales. Their status as inventions, rather than observations, is uncontested, allowing for a sense of play and experiment, often yielding surprising results. In Small Rocky Object, for example, the purportedly diminutive object appears to be orbited by two crescent moons; in Three Sun System, the subjects appear conjoined, portending some sort of pint-sized celestial reckoning. In Construct, a larger-scaled canvas, the forms read more like amoebas, tiny cellular forms edging apart and multiplying amid a typically ordered array of chaos.

Iseri’s constellations and galactic imaginings have roots in modernist techniques of collage and atavistic yearnings for straightforward modes of expressing the utterly profound. Crucially, though, they maintain their striking newness through an uncluttered and frank approach to their own materiality. The artist takes great care to achieve the sort of randomized balance of form and weight present in his subjects themselves, while also presenting them exactly as they are. Illusion is largely stripped away, leaving the viewer with an upfront and candid estimation of infinity.