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John AnchetaHABITAT

September 15 - October 22, 2011
Opening: September 15, 2011 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Battat Contemporary is pleased to announce Habitat, John Ancheta’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist’s latest exhibition is a focused expansion of his pictural language. The resulting body of work is an intersection between recurrent themes drawn from his interest in digital media, video and pixilation and the introduction of ideas dealing with personal history and collective memory. The painterly canvases featured in Habitat are a marked departure from the flat, austere abstraction of past series such as Aquacades and Aether. Here Ancheta presents us with a series of landscapes and figures that are obliterated by bold brushwork and dense paint creating a unique tension between the image and the physicality of the artist’s material. This acute shift away from flatness, combined with a corrupted transmittance of painterly illusion invites the viewer to entertain Ancheta’s notion of the painting as screen. In this fluctuant space between image and surface, we are being held in a momentary glitch of transmission, an instant that simultaneously renders an experience of the past and an anticipation of the future as indiscernible. In conjunction with this exhibition Battat Contemporary is publishing a catalog also entitled Habitat which includes an essay by notable writer John Bentley Mays as well as an interview with John Ancheta and artist Benjamin Klein. The launching of the publication will take place at the vernissage.

John Ancheta (b. 1973 Long Beach California) is a painter and musician based in Montreal, Canada. Ancheta studied sound engineering at the Institute of Communication Arts in Vancouver, BC (1993) and Fine Arts (1997-2000) and Philosophy (2004-2007) at Concordia University.