↳ Exhibitions

Ned Vena at Project Native Informant

June 29, 2018

Artist: Ned Vena

Exhibition title: Facts

Venue: Project Native Informant, London, UK

Date: May 4 – June 23, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London

Project Native Informant is pleased to present New York-based artist Ned Vena’s second solo exhibition, FACTS.

Building on his most recent presentation with the gallery during CONDO London in January 2018, Vena presents a suite of six new paintings, all 60 1/4 x 48 x 1 3/8”. Departing from friezes of his own tattoos, the works depict the act of tattooing itself: a leg or a top of a hand belonging to Vena, his wife or a friend. The images vary from close-ups of the tattooer’s latex covered hands, to images of the tattoo parlor and the tools of the trade—rolls of plastic wrap, bottles of ink, etc.

UV printing introduced the concept that any flat surface can be printed on. In the paintings onview, an image is printed onto a piece of linen primed with acrylic gesso. This initial printing is then followed by a painting that covers an area of the printing, which is then reprinted with croppedimages made from the original digital file. The cropped images cover the painting and repeated until the painting is finished, producing layers of printing and painting. Areas of mistake, overlap,mis-registration, transparency and errant paint application previously used by artists to engage in an idea of painterly gesture, appear through a digital application, but according to the exacting precision necessitated by digital technology.

For the first time, Vena plays with spatial dimension both in formal concepts of layering as well asin a classical sense of foreground and background. Moreover the paintings are hung side by side as if in continuum or invoking narrative. The placement suggests a structuring of a life or livesthey depict, as much as underlining the specificity of each painting, each charged with a meaningyet to be fully consumed.