MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Fragile and Unregulated, a virtual exhibition curated by gallery’s artist Brian Rochefort, opening online at MASSIMODECARLO VSpace. Fragile and Unregulated is the fourth in a series of artist curated projects to take place in our virtual space. For the occasion, Brian Rochefort has conceived a virtual exhibition that brings together painters and sculptors who work in a nonrepresentational style - yet anchored in figuration, nature and reality, that invites universal interpretation.

Fragile and Unregulated presents a selection of artworks by the American based artists Julian Hoeber, Maysha Mohamedi, Spencer Lewis and Brian Rochefort, the Chinese artist Zhang Enli and the French duo Tursic & Mille. Rochefort searched for artists who worked in either a similar motif or shared a familiar mark making technique, yet having a unique and personal approach to the use of colour and patterns.

Zhang Enli (b. 1965 in Jilin, China. Lives and works in Shanghai), best known for his symbolic and figurative paintings, also explores abstraction through dissolved and open brush strokes, creating enveloping and dynamic paintings. The work A Melancholic Person (2019), with a deeply evocative title that binds it to the realm of reality, is a large and airy painting with elegant linear marks that relate strongly to Maysha Mohamedi’s canvas, both having a subtle grid structure overlapped with non-iconic floating imagery. Mohamedi (b. 1980 in Los Angeles, where she lives and works) creates lyrical abstract paintings with geometric elements and a balanced colour palette that reflects the fragile and regulated order of the natural world.

Julian Hoeber (b. 1974 in Philadelphia. Lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary and multi-dimensional artist who works with tromp l’oeil paintings, architectural sculpture, photography, and drawing. By creating optical and sensory illusions, Hoeber investigates intuitive processes and the relation between concept and form, consciousness and physical reality. His gridded painting here exhibited is meticulous yet painstakingly worked with light scuffs hovering over a vortex to signify space and depth. In a

complementary approach, Spencer Lewis’ paintings have strong confident directionality but with raucousness. Lewis (b. 1979. Lives and works in Los Angeles) creates very gestural and colourful paintings which originate from digital drawings and rigorous studies to then escalate to an explosive improvisation, generating very fleshy paintings. Although abstract, his paintings evoke the human figure for their proportions and vertical impetus.

Tursic & Mille (Ida Tursic, b. 1974 in Belgrade, Serbia. Wilfreid Mille, b. 1974 in Boulogne-sur-mer, France. Live and work in France) are the outliers in the exhibition, with a figurative foreground, but with suspended dash marks that echo Zhang Enli’s painting. Their work takes inspiration from the contemporary abundance of images, found on the Internet, magazines, movies and other media, and interrogates how this pre-existent material can be transformed into paintings, resisting obscurity and anonymity.

Finally, the curator of Fragile and Unregulated, Brian Rochefort (b. 1985 in Rhode Island. Lives and works in Los Angeles) participates with a new ceramic sculpture titled Supervolcano that recalls the crater of a submarine volcano erupting a pinkish and dense molten magma.