Off Paradise

About the Gallery
Off Paradise is a gallery located on Walker Street founded by Natacha Polaert in the fall of 2019. The name evokes the old neighborhood of Five Points, at the center of which was a small, triangular park, full of hopes and grime, called Paradise Square. It also invokes Paradise Alley, the artists’ and poets’ colony on the then-godforsaken corner of Avenue A and East 11th Street that is referenced in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans. Off Paradise is a fictional place, right off Paradise, adjacent to it, but not exactly it.

About the Presentation
For its seventh participation in Independent, Off Paradise is pleased to debut Rising, a three-person presentation of new or rarely seen works by Sylvia Fragoso (b. 1962), Mitchell Charbonneau (b. 1994), and Maximilian Schubert (b. 1983).

Since 1984, Fragoso has worked at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California, a vital and progressive studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Over the past forty years, as their longest tenured artist, she has produced hundreds of delicate clay sculptures. Often tributes to the memories of her childhood home and spiritual spaces, Fragoso’s mysterious towers topped with crucifixes reflect her devout Catholicism. Rising marks Fragoso’s East Coast debut and her first time showing with the gallery.

In Rising, Charbonneau’s metal reliefs imprint the walls with the cold, matte surface of hammered metal, evoking the dense rawness of a subterranean refuge. Molded from sections of his childhood home, these works transform concrete into richly textured metal forms. For the first time, Charbonneau debuts this series—Foundations—at a monumental scale in lead. With its soft, dense opaqueness, this Foundation, one of the artist’s largest works to date, reads almost like a life-size portrait of the “sitter.” 

A suite of luminous “canvases” from Schubert’s newest “Untitled” series offers a stark contrast. Using the old master technique of glazing—applying thin layers to build color, depth, and light—Schubert creates works made entirely from poured, translucent polyurethane. They are cast urethane resin objects—hybrids, really, of painting and sculpture that refuse to cohere into one or the other.