These practices explore human connection – and distance – in all its various forms

From JR's urban interventions to Faiza Butt's sensual ceramics: Discover six fresh voices in ‘OVR: Portals’

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Prior to the pandemic, using the Internet to visit galleries from afar felt like a futuristic lark or a convenient compromise. Now that platforms such as Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms have come into their own as fully developed interfaces for experiencing art digitally, we can confront a knottier truth: People have been socially distant in various ways for as long as there has been a distinction between you and I; as featured works in ‘<a href="/ovr">OVR: Portals</a>’ indicate, lockdown just brought it all into stark relief. Here are a handful of young artists who negotiate contemporary conditions of alienation and possibility in a world whose technologies of connection have yet to transcend its historical power structures.

At&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1457/Vadehra-Art-Gallery">Vadehra Art Gallery</a> (New Delhi),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/21345/Faiza-Butt">Faiza Butt</a>’s recent paintings and sculptures contend with the aspect of the everyday most ruptured by the pandemic: human touch. Butt (b. 1973, Lahore, Pakistan) has long made her subject the hug itself, and here she depicts people arranged around various states of embrace. In The Epoch (2018), two pointillist figures almost kiss against a detailed background of water bottles, popsicles, and fruit. In Nexus (2021), one person slumps into another on vibrant, hand-marbled paper. The Sleepless Constellation - 2 (2016) is a ceramic bowl adorned with underglaze paintings of the artist’s daughter surrounded by stylized cosmos and Star Wars Legos. In Butt’s work, cultural detritus infiltrates our means of holding and connecting with each other, and her figures look exhausted as they seek refuge in each other’s arms.

While humans are centered in Butt’s work,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/30381/Louisa-Gagliardi">Louisa Gagliardi</a>&nbsp;(b. 1989, Sion, Switzerland) conveys the ambivalence typical of a present in which the material and digital become harder to tell apart. Gagliardi creates images in Photoshop, prints them on PVC banners, and then adds materials like nail polish and gel medium. The painterly gestures meld seamlessly with the works’ computerized surfaces. Riders (2021), presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/4052/Galeria-Dawid-Radziszewski">Galeria Dawid Radziszewski</a> (Warsaw), shows a crowded subway with foregrounded graffiti; in Under the Breath (2021), people gather around a table in a space clammy with fluorescent lighting, fog, and pigeons. No one in these paintings looks at each other – the empty plates in Over the Table (2021) carry a more intense affective charge than the figures’ faces.

Anhedonia belies the persistence of beauty, a theme taken up by Mathis Collins (b. 1986, Paris) at Galerie&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1096/Galerie-Cr%C3%A8vec%C5%93ur">Crèvecœur</a> (Paris). In a series of colorful wood-carved bas-reliefs, titled ‘The book ends’ (all 2021), Collins addresses age-old tactics of enduring an isolated self: imagination and intoxication. Each piece is a fantastical scene located on a bookshelf, where a puppet-like avatar of the artist evokes fairytale reverie and real-world nightmare. In Strung Out books, he snoozes next to a pile of empty bottles. In Hitler in Menilmontant, he glares at the cowering fascist across a set of bleeding books. Collins points to extreme vulnerability in the unconscious of a violent society, and its effects on those who use its poisons to cope. Even the etchings’ carved dimples look like pills.

Proliferating thresholds – asleep/awake, sober/smashed, online/offline – prompt the projection of porousness. At&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1093/Galleria-Continua">Galleria Continua</a> (San Gimignano, Beijing, Boissy-le-Châtel, Havana, Paris, Rome, and São Paulo), the artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7402/JR">JR</a>&nbsp;(b. 1983, Paris) demonstrates his use of real-world boundaries as medium. The aerial photograph Tehachapi, Daytime, Triptych, U.S.A., 2019 (2019) shows the results of his collaboration with captive people and staff at a maximum-security prison: A giant black-and-white group portrait was wheat-pasted onto the roof of one of the compound’s buildings, the people looking up toward the sky. Eye #4, Estadio de Pacaembu, Sao Paulo, 2020 (2020) is an image of a gigantic eye, comprised of paper that the artist pasted onto the stadium’s stairs, with people sitting and walking between iris and eyelash. The viewer is implicated: What of you inhabits these spaces just by looking?

Ideas surrounding the human body come up elegantly in works by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/56901/Maria-de-los-Angeles-Rodriguez-Jimenez">Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez</a>’s (b. 1992, Holguín, Cuba) at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2957/David-Castillo">David Castillo</a>&nbsp;(Miami). Her sculptural paintings use bold acrylic colors on folds of velvet and leather that spill over rebar frames. The distended flow of material suggests flesh and organs that open into shared being, even as they assert the presence of an individual. Fabrics are stretched tight at the top of Lo que sufrió esa niña (2019, ‘What the girl suffered’), then crease and collapse toward the floor, where they extend into the semblance of a figure. We might not know what she suffered, but grace is present nonetheless.

The depth of racial inequity revealed by the pandemic underlines the potency of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/24415/Awol-Erizku">Awol Erizku</a>’s pieces at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1342/Ben-Brown-Fine-Arts">Ben Brown Fine Arts</a>&nbsp;(London, Hong Kong and Palm Beach). Erizku (b. 1988, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) is renowned for images of embodied Black power, which is seen here in the photograph HEAT (2019–2020): On the left, a Black femme holds a handgun with a glance both casual and attentive; on the right, three hands hold candles that join at the flames. In the neon Fuck Twelve (2018), the letter ‘C’ drops below the titular phrase (‘twelve’ is another word for ‘police’).&nbsp;This could signal dejection at the continued need for abolitionist refrains as much as it could be an imperative to put back the ‘C’ and keep screaming. Meanings are shrugged off and antagonized, as to point a way forward.

‘OVR: Portals’ is curated by Magalí Arriola, Christina Li, and Larry Ossei-Mensah and will run from June 16–19, 2021. Find out more on&nbsp;<a href="http://www.artbasel.com/ovr">www.artbasel.com/ovr</a>.Nicholas Nauman is a writer based in Los Angeles.Top image: Faiza Butt, The Epoch (detail), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.

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These practices explore human connection – and distance – in all its various forms

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From JR's urban interventions to Faiza Butt's sensual ceramics: Discover six fresh voices in ‘OVR: Portals’

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