Stephen Dean: Rehearsal With Props: Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Stephen Dean is an American/French multi-media artist, whose interest spans watercolor, video and installation. His time- based works and installations summon physiological and anthropological approaches to color. Often working from existing forms or events, Dean focuses on the immediacy of color and it’s ability to precede language and cultural codes. With a sense of exploration, his contemplative and immersive works engage the chromatic spectrum as a spatial and social matter.

For his third exhibition at galeria Casa Triangulo, titled Rehearsal with props, Dean will present works in dichroic glass and watercolor which continue to expand the boundaries of color by weaving together notions of transparency and duration. He has used glass throughout his career for its conceptual and perceptual properties. Glass, for Dean, embodied by its qualities of reflectivity, transparency, and fluid mutability, highlights the fleeting temporal nature of the observed world.

In the gallery, his signature Ladder sculpture, a self-standing black aluminum ladder with panes of dichroic glass, simulta- neously reflective and translucent, appears to be in a constant state of flux. Ladder is an outward bound sculpture. From up close, a strange density and saturation develops. Even the black frame changes hues. From a distant perspective, it opens up in the space confusing reflections, projections and shadows. The work speaks of a painterly awareness, drawing attention to the mobility of color beyond the stillness of the object.

In the Atlas series, Dean stages a broken syntax, by juxtaposing glass elements and watercolors. Painted on cigarette paper, these small works convey a sense of immediacy while depicting ethereal and natural phenomena. Their simplicity belies the fact that these works operate in sophisticated ways, ranging from gentle motions to uncanny gestures. and never revealing a complete picture.

“Dean’s works, abstractly engage with a sense of space, geographic and conceptual. What connects his series is a combination of communal identification and specificity within the technically produced conditions of the world that surrounds us.”

Sara Reisman, artistic director of the Rubin foundation, New York City.