MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is very pleased to present Roland Flexner’s fifth exhibition with the gallery, and first at Pièce Unique in Paris.

Two Ghosts is part of a series of paintings started in the 1980’s with motifs drawn from the teeming riches of popular culture.

By painting cloth on canvas, our attention shifts to the material of color in an immersive pictorial tautology. The figures interact with the fabric of the canvas in an interplay of cool and warm shades of grey. Two Ghosts is realized in a subtractive process in which the materiality of paint is reduced to a transparent film that erases all traces of brushwork to achieve the unity of an image that appears all at once.

With this approach, the painting announced Flexner’s iconic series of Mourners (Pleurants) where draped figures floated in featureless color in a fusion of gesture and gravity. This union of figure and abstraction brought together in a conceptual diptych, an image of sorrow reduced to a folded drapery and the ultimate degree of abstraction, the monochrome.

The uncanny quality of presence and absence characterizes much of the artist’s work that includes the bubble drawings, figures and vanitas, Sumi ink works, and installations combining sculpture, drawing and photography.

In his drawing practice, Roland Flexner explores the expressive qualities of ink using breath, chance and gravity to reveal the pictorial potential of the medium that emerges out of abstraction, and suggests the ambiguous nature of images in the viewer’s eyes.