” SLOW DAYS”
BEN WOLF NOAM
We are pleased to present a new show of works by artist Ben Wolf Noam, with an opening reception tonight, Friday 16/11 at 20:00.
The show will be accompanied by a 85 page book of Noam’s drawings from the past four years in Athens.
ESSAY FROM CATALOGUE:
“It seems a crime to go to bed early in Greece…”
Lawrence Durrell, The Greek Islands
So Ben is already up, right there on the veranda at 10 a.m. with his big black sketchbook and his fat pencils and all, and the others are still sleeping because there was some party until the early morning, and Ben was there too, of course he was, almost on that same spot drawing portraits in the half-light, and now there he is again trying to decide whether that thing in the sea, off the coast between Kimolos and Milos, is a sphinx-looking rock or a rock-looking sphinx. Either way, it is uncharted territory. He will inevitably deal with it using his very own unprocessed graphic style, sometimes raw, sometimes smooth, and always totally free from preconceived notions of narrative duty, historicity and such other horrors.
Same thing a couple of weeks earlier, somewhere in the port of Hydra, near the hotel with the palm trees and the artsy people, and one summer later in Athens confronting the urban landscapes of splendour and decay, and drawing, constantly, relentlessly, indoors, outdoors, portraits of friends in houses and of statues in archaeological museums, treating every subject equally, giving the same share of soul to an acquaintance blown down by the Greek heatwave and to a bronze effigy hit in the face by the heavy punch of History.
The drawings of Ben Wolf Noam constitute quite a diary. One could say a literary one. The spectator is invited to read the discovery of very particular and expressive people in the same time (and temporality) as the young artist does, through many consecutive summers during which his style evolves, opens up, gets accustomed to the localness of things on the one hand, and of their permanent transgression on the other.
—Makis Malafekas
BIO:
Ben Wolf Noam was born in Boston, MA, in 1987, and received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. He has exhibited throughout America, Europe and the Middle East. Exhibitions include Sade Gallery (Los Angeles), Plaza Plaza (London), The Breeder Gallery (Athens) Suzanne Geiss Co. (New York), Museo di Capodimonte (Naples, Italy), Martos Gallery (Los Angeles), Metropolitan Art Society/Aishti Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), and others. He has had performances commissioned by Night Gallery and PS1 MoMA.
Ben Wolf Noam’s visual, curatorial, and performative work has been presented in Frieze, The Observer, Vice, T Magazine, ArtFCity, Art in America, Artforum, Nylon, Purple Magazine and many others. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
AETOPOULOS’ SPACE
Address: 24 Perikleous, 105 62, Athens
