CASUAL T
Tony Lewis
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is very pleased to present Tony Lewis’ first exhibition in our Parisian outpost, CAUSAL T.
Full sentence Grouping:
I can’t believe how dull my life is. It’s so boring here. I know, I know from your faces that you share with me the feeling of compassion and the feeling of a outrage that this kind of thing should have happened, what in fact are we going to do to this policeman and what in fact are we going to do to this barmen? Shoot for the Moon! Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. The American community has refused to do this. Nothing ever changes around here. Nothing ever happens. We’ve got the care that it happens, we’ve got to do what we can to change the warp and woof of moral thought in society in such fashion as to try to make it happen less and less. Don’t waste time bathing in the negative experience. Spin your energy and focus you attention on moving on. What a perfect Day! Our ideals rather are some sort of a superficial coating which we come up with at any given moment in order to justify whatever commercial and anoxious experiment we are engaged in. Wow! This is the future!
Phrase Grouping:
It seems to me that of all the indictments, you have greatness within you. What year in the future are we going to deal with him as white man? Other people’s opinion of you does not have to become your filth! Contamination! Pestilence! Ha Ha Ha!
Artist
Tony Lewis was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Chicago.
Lewis’s practice focuses on the relationship between semiotics and language to confront social and political topics such as race, power, communication, and labour. Lewis creates drawings using graphite, pencil and paper, mediums the artist uses to trace and develop abstract narratives and reflections on the notion of the gestural. By pushing the boundaries of drawing and the possibilities of abstraction, he expands the use of the “material” of language. As expressed by Melissa Chiu, Director of Hirshhorn Museum: ‘Lewis has quickly established himself in the contemporary art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction, and his monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging, and erasing text, he shifts the way we move through language to open up new and unexpected readings.’
Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017–2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA