Age of excess

Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Age of Excess by gallery artist Chino Amobi. This will be Amobi’s first New York solo presentation, and the first show in Rosen’s new second location, at 11 East 78th Street. The exhibition will open September 6th and remain on view until October 15.

Amobi will present Idylls, a new series of paintings, in addition to video work. Inspired by the botanical symbols of floral categorization, he explores the role of decadence in contemporary culture through his Eroica Hybrid predictive models, an economic model Amobi uses to generate, anticipate, and subvert value across mediums.

Amobi draws from the golden age of American cinema and fin de siècle French painting as moments in history when cultural decadence ushered in technical flourishes in artmaking, flush with symbols of promise. Building on his previous work which integrated science fiction and mythology into images which enmesh the trappings of technology and the vastness of the cosmos, Amobi’s new body of work functions through the archetype of Janus, looking forward and backward in time and seeing an uncannily similar picture. A gateway in time becomes a hall of mirrors. Idylls describe the scenes of everyday life in a small, intimate world, evoking pastoral utopia. Amobi’s Idylls are set in the 21st century urban city. His language of signs pulls from the history of art, such as the tulips of 17th century Dutch still life painting, a signifier of nobility and prosperity. Amobi embeds these symbols within cinematic worlds where the natural specimens are basked in neon light. Our current systems of financial forecasting and speculative wealth come into focus as not a revolutionary system, but an unfettered desire for accumulation, which has been present all along.

Amobi’s video, created for the exhibition, montage archival clips from old Hollywood films against new electronic songs composed by the artist. The piece takes Mark Fischer’s concept of hauntology in twenty-first century cultural production, wherein the artwork of the past is worn as a mask and the “disappearance of the future mean[s] the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different than the one in which we currently live.” The film breaks the spells the paintings seek to conjure, as the logic of science fiction and world building fold back on themselves as a historical mode of imagining.

By synthesizing strategies drawn from film, literature, contemporary music, and art Amobi opens the aperture of what is at stake in how modes of conceiving the future and past are constructed and employed. Age of Excess provokes a voracious forward and backward looking. A sudden dissociation from the symbols and structures we’ve stood upon gives way to the disintegration of the present. In this space of groundlessness, specters emerge.