Marlon Kroll: A CHRONIQUE FEAR

Marvin Gardens is pleased to announce the opening of Montreal-based Marlon Kroll’s “A Chronique Fear” in our Best Western space. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

There is a poetics in Kroll’s work that dances around the familiar and spins it slightly into the unknown, in both material use and imagery. This exhibition displays “paintings” made of color pencil on acrylic-prepared muslin stretched over panel. The generous layering of pencil creates a very unique delicate waxy sheen, while the intimate size of the panels is effective in quietly pulling the viewer closer to fully appreciate this surface.

The linework and imagery are equally intriguing. A mid-century sense of abstracted form and diagrammatic stillness is present but with an updated and brighter color palette. Some of the drawing appears to be a form of an exploded schematic, detailing parts of something tenuously mechanical of which we aren’t quite sure of its function or ultimate shape. Arp-like abstractions both anchor and float within the compositions. Space is rendered and then countered back into flatness as these abstractions slowly reveal themselves in their floating stillness upon the wall. Occasionally recognizable subjects become apparent: the outline of a face, the shape of an apple. Mostly however, the work sits comfortably on the strength of its own architecture.