Petit-Mâitre (2010)

OAOA Petit-Maître
Galerie van Gelder
September 2010

Collaboration with OAOA Stellar Om Source and Mathew Lutz-Kinoy
(Performance, video, variable media)

In the twentieth century, some art historians described Raoul Dufy as a petit maître of modernism. His work embraced lightness, ornament and pleasure— preferring humble atmosphere over the monumental ambitions that defined modern painting’s heroic narrative. Positioned slightly to the side of modernism’s central architects, Dufy occupied a curious space where elegance and minor gestures persisted.

Petit-Maître takes this sideways position as a working method. Like Dufy, OAOA approaches exhibition-making through small deviations, where charm becomes a strategy and the peripheral occasionally reorganizes the center.