Insatiable Fire

@ Lamar Dodd School of Art,

UGA, Athens, GA

- 1/27/2023 - 2/23/2023

Press Release:

Insatiable Fire features new works by Atlanta-based artists Demetri Burke, Noah Reyes and Sergio Suárez. These artists bring contemporary painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking to exciting new terrain at the intersection of narrative figuration and abstraction. Their works deftly open up and explore spaces between individuals and cultures, drawing upon personal and collective histories of affection and trauma, navigation of borders, translation and the porosity of language.

The Mesoamerican post-classical ceremony of Fuego Nuevo (New Fire) symbolizes the renewal of the universe and a collaborative effort to delay the end of the world, as Sergio Suárez described in his recent solo exhibition with that title. Demetri Burke evokes fire as “always steady, but never still.” The artworks in this exhibit reflect these associations, feeling situated both in the present and in dream-like or mythic spaces, with forms incessantly generating and dissipating. Burke incorporates collage of found imagery to rupture the cohesive picture space of his figurative paintings. Reyes densely aggregates layers of gesso and marker to create an atmospheric personal iconography of forms-in-flux. Suárez displays meticulously carved and inked woodcut matrices embellished by accompanying sculptural forms. The works elicit a palpable intimacy with the viewer, inviting close looking and contemplation of renewal through material process.