Piero Atchugarry Gallery is pleased to present Parisian artist Laure Mary’s debut Miami solo exhibition, Interdum Mane, taking its title from the Latin phrase meaning “sometimes in the morning.” Latin, technically considered a “dead” language, opens a broader question at the heart of the exhibition: can art, too, ever die? This question becomes a portal through which to understand Mary’s latest body of dusky, surrealist oil paintings.
Beginning her days between 4:00 and 5:00 AM, Mary creates works that inhabit the threshold between dream and reality. Recognizable objects are placed in cinematic dreamlike arrangements: a fedora suspended above an empty armchair, a house nested within a mountain landscape and set inside the larger canvas like a window within a window, and chairs echoed and doubled across the exhibition.
For Mary, objects are never singular in meaning. Headwear, among the most versatile accessories since antiquity and long tied to social status and identity, suggests duality, disguise, and role play throughout the exhibition.
Chairs recur as symbols of identity, reception, reflection, and hierarchy: paired in confrontation in La séance 1 and La séance 2, French for “the session”, receding in a solitary row in Le vertige “dizziness”, or standing empty in a doorway’s light in L’éclosion du jour “the breaking of the day”. Framing becomes compositionally intentional, granting Mary the ability to stage layered realities with recurring miniature houses, nested landscapes, and frame-within-a-frame compositions suggesting shelter, memory, and spaces that remain visible yet unreachable. Her quiet interiors and symbolic objects draw from Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque still life, while reimagining traditional meditations on life, time, and mortality through a contemporary, distinctly female perspective. Through vacant interiors, domestic objects, female busts, and peeled apples, Mary transforms the language of vanitas into something more intimate and psychological.
Exhibiting for the first time at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Chinese-born, New York-based artist, Jesse Zuo presents Photosynthesis, an exhibition of new paintings that, like the process from which the exhibition takes its name, begins with absorption: of light, color, memory and feeling. What emerges is not a record of what the artist has seen. Zuo does not set out to reveal the extraordinary concealed within the mundane, rather, it is the attention she gives to those experiences that becomes transformative.
In a world saturated with noise and clutter, Zuo places the ordinary center stage. A ray of sunlight caught in a glossy surface, a burst of color glimpsed inside an open wardrobe, the faint sheen of sweat on skin in summer heat. Rather than compete with the volume of contemporary life, she absorbs its smallest, most overlooked incidents and turns them into something worth looking at— twice. This attentiveness has always shaped the way Zuo sees, but it has taken on new urgency as she has grown increasingly drawn to stillness over spectacle. “I find real peace,” she
says, “in the beauty of the mundane.”
At its core, photosynthesis is a process of transformation; a plant takes light, carbon dioxide and water and converts them into stored chemical energy and oxygen. We don’t see photosynthesis happening, we see its consequence— growth, color, leaves, flowers. It is, in essence, a mechanism through which light becomes matter. Zuo’s paintings enact a parallel conversion. Observed light becomes color, a passing sensation is crystalized into image, an instant that might otherwise disappear is held in place and subjected to the prolonged attention of painting.
What ‘Photosynthesis’ ultimately makes clear is that attention is a choice. To notice the way light catches a surface, the shimmer steel-blue Mary Jane flats against a marbled checkered floor, or the passing gesture of a friend is to resist the speed with which such moments consistently disappear. Zuo chooses to hold them in her gaze long enough for transformation to occur. She extends that invitation to us. Look again, remain a little longer, and discover what sustained looking might make visible.
Piero Atchugarry gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey. The gallery opened to the public in September 2013 with a Post-War Italian art exhibition. By January 2014 the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzón. In this space the program allowed outdoor and indoor proposal exploration, through the creation of dialogue between architectural features and curatorial practices.
On December 2018, the program expanded to North America with a second location, a 9000 square feet warehouse on 5520 NE 4th Avenue in the Design District neighborhood. The participation of the gallery in what is a boiling art community that connects Europe, Latin America and both coasts of the United States represents the commitment of the program to support and present the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.
