MELANIE LUNA

Season’s Greetings

October 6th - October 9th 2022

Swivel Gallery is proud to present Season’s Greetings, a solo presentation of Melanie Luna for this year's edition of Swab Art Fair in Barcelona, Spain from October 6th to 9th. Luna’s works are riveting, contemplative, but simultaneously ruthless, delivering to us a gut punch, a visceral experience that taps into our collective fears, putting us both on our heels and on notice in the same moment. Luna’s contemporary allegories are Shakespearean in their dark comedic nature, stemming from her generation's tempestuous relationship to a world of constant catastrophe where the word of the day, every day, is danger.

In her examination of Western Culture and our decision making, Luna utilizes myths, everlasting questions of evolution, the past; while also looking to the future – it is everything everywhere all at once. There is no mark of any culture, but an overarching view of all cultures of oppressed people, of oppressed creatures, and of an oppressed earth. Her work is a direct assault on contemporary art’s typically mitigated bureau. Arthur Rimbaud once prolifically said, “we must be absolutely modern.” Contemporary art was once measured by the avant-garde, telling hard truths, to reflect, accept, and move forward with new ways of thinking and questioning. Here is where Luna excels, as she moves radically against the grain of popular culture and tactfully delves in murky waters. In context with the fair's location, the artist’s discourse echoes Goya’s late, infamous Negras Pinturas.

This year's presentation includes three new paintings, as well as an installation of the artist’s conceptual works on found encyclopedia paper. Luna’s simple gesture of marking a bloody hand over an animal or a historical text creates a commentary on how history is constantly distorted, while simultaneously accepting responsibility for our part in nature's distress, all through her mark-making. The foreboding snake in Left Hand (Snake) marks the entrance to the booth, while another set of the paper works are hung in the formation of a cross, implicating Christianity in the manipulation and destruction of history.

The three large scale paintings surround a loose narrative and are perhaps Luna’s most gripping works to date. The massive diptych features a primate in a landscape devoid of time or place; making us question whether this is a biblical tale of the past or a harbinger of a precarious future. In the left panel, Fauna, there is an emblazoned forest with the creature’s back turned on us, looking out into the carnage in a position of sorrow; the right panel, Flora, features the dark forest smoldering into the abyss. Its counterpart, Factory Reset, alludes to the aftermath of the previous scene. A haze eerily encircles a few remaining trees and branches that have turned to ash, marking all that is left from the chaos. It is as they say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and here, we can decipher that the primate is a stand-in for us, for evolution, a notion that as we constantly move forward with little thought, our only concern is progress, even if that progress is only toward a final destination of destruction.