Radia Presents the 6 Degrees Experiment, Felipe Fredes: Crystal-Realizations
(Brooklyn, New York) - Radia is proud to present the 6 Degrees Experiment which will exhibit Felipe Fredes: Crystal-Realizations, curated by Romina Aurora at 8 pm on Friday, November 18th, at the Brooklyn Art Cave. The show will debut the recent oil paintings and silver gelatin works by the Chilean, Denmark-based artist. This is the artist’s second appearance in New York City.
Radia’s goal of uncovering the unknown through social experimentation parallels Fredes’s artistic approach to uncovering the vivid unknown, however, his chosen medium is scientific experimentation. The artist is an accomplished Fulbright scholar, and full-time neuroscientist that integrates both his research on the human brain and memory, and technique with the use of scientific instruments when creating.
Many of the exhibited works are drawn from his scientific life and allude to the inner, permeating mystery of life. Fredes uses a scientific process called freeze fracture labeling, and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) to take images of the brain tissue at a subcellular scale. This resolution is 1,000 times greater than a light microscope and about 500,000 times greater than that of a human eye. The result is a crater-like abstraction that serves as the foundation of his Self-Portrait and several other works in the exhibition. These works reflect how a thought takes form in the brain, or what that may look like at a subcellular level. In a way, he works on a metaphysical picture plane, where he paints on an image of the brain, forming an image. There will be no transcendence from this point, and like the saying “no one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky,” he believes our reality is confined to our cognition and fades into illusion. His brushstrokes become proofs of reality as a derivative of our inherent crystallizations—one more mark until a form becomes ‘something,’ one more scrap of information for our senses to make solid an idea, and time defines the rest.
Fredes treads carefully between the line of reality and illusion. For Fredes, our visual world is a crystallization of an idea, which causes the proliferation of visible forms and sensations, that becomes our reality. In other words, our realizations are perpetual crystallizations, and for Fredes, a mark on a canvas is as crystallized and intense as the world around us. Like Cezanne’s “the landscape thinks itself through me,” Fredes plunges into reality and unfolds it on canvas, until it fragments and dissolves. Fredes wickedly unveils our painted reality and shows us how these illusions dwindle away, and what is left is nothing. He shows us through the gradual disappearance of figures in his triptychs, semiotic cubes, geometric shapes, and silver gelatin works that bear an unseen plane. The hyphen between crystal(lization) and realization contains all the critical points that happen between the image-making in our minds, and our painted reality.
