From his earlier small mechanized flip book machines, to his kinetic sculptures, Fontanive has long explored a dual interest in the rhythmic pulse of the natural world and the moving image. This latest body of work, which consists of brightly colored paintings, enameled wall reliefs and hanging mobiles, is based on imagined structures made up of invented physical objects that balance and hold together through the laws of nature – gravity, friction, etc. In the paintings, these elements and their spatial relationships are imagined, while in the metal reliefs the components are taken off the plain and literally cut and reassembled into a new configuration. And in the mobiles, each component – its movement, weight and equilibrium – must be logically considered and weighed. Fontanive remarks that there is a type of transposition between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and asks what do we experience from that dimensional interval?
The exhibition title, intentionally grammatically ambiguous, is meant as a metaphor for life, through time. “Faster is a description of speed, speed is a function of movement through time.”
J.C. Fontanive holds a BA from Syracuse University and an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. He was the 2018 recipient of the Stein Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL. He lives and works in Bushwick, New York.
