THE CITRIC FRAGMENT

Exhibition Dates:
September 1, 2023 - October 20, 2023

Opening Reception:
Friday, September 1, 2023, 5:00-9:00pm

Artist Talk:
Saturday, September 2, 2023, 11:00am-12:00pm

Rivalry Projects is excited to present The Citric Fragment, a solo exhibition of new works by Chicago-based artist Leonardo Kaplan. The presentation, Kaplan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, will open to the public on Friday, September 1 and will be on view through October 20, 2023. Join us for an Opening Reception on First Friday, September 1, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 PM. 

The exhibition presents a collection of new photographic collage paintings that evoke a distrust of affect, belief, and brutality. Utilizing a variety of deconstructions, corruptions, and corrosions of faces and figures, these works reveal a chemically mutated dissonance and contaminated disconnection to our own cognitive interiority. They highlight the absence of empathy and widespread confusion, mania, and paranoia that has inundated every channel of communication and information of our current moment. Furthermore, the works in this exhibition glare at the logic of violence in assimilation, a crisis of trust, and the awareness (or lack thereof) or artifice. 

The photographic collage material used in Kaplan’s artwork is sourced from a wide variety of printed materials, personal photographs and objects, devices, trash and living things. These toner transferred images are used gesturally over luscious and atmospheric grounds. They seem to suggest the metaphysical baggage that comes with symbols and meaning. These works attempt to articulate the internal qualities of their subjects, by means of carefully composed layers of hair dye, mark making, photos and textures. Much of the process concerned itself with discretely merging the material properties, to the point where it becomes impossible to discern the construction or origin of these images.

WORKS

INSTALLATION VIEWS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Leonardo Kaplan (b. 1985, Bogota, Colombia, lives and works in Chicago, IL)

Leonardo Kaplan is a working artist based in Chicago. He has exhibited in galleries across the US and Europe, with exhibitions at Specialist Gallery, Seattle; The Graham Foundation, Chicago; New Capital Projects, Chicago; Freies Museum, Berlin; No Place, Columbus, OH; and at NADA Art Fairs, in New York and Miami.

He co-directed The Hills Esthetic Center and BOYFRIENDS, and currently directs Special Feature, which founded in 2021, exhibits emerging artists working in all media.