Untitled Art Houston 2026: BOOTH B11

ABC-ARTE brings together Brazilian painter Antonio Kuschnir (2001), Austro-Italian artist Jorrit Tornquist (1938), and two hyperrealistic ceramic sculptures by Bertozzi & Casoni in a project centered on perception and on the ways images construct our experience of reality. Although rooted in different generations and artistic traditions, their practices converge in questioning the instability of vision: through narrative, color, and sculpture, what appears familiar is continually revealed, transformed, or called into doubt.

Antonio Kuschnir’s most recent paintings explore what might be described as an uncertain Arcadia: landscapes that evoke the European pastoral tradition while simultaneously disrupting its apparent balance. Resting figures, wandering characters, and symbolic presences inhabit lush environments that at first glance seem idyllic. Beneath this surface calm, however, a constant tension emerges: dragons surface from the vegetation, snakes move silently through the landscape, and moments of stillness gradually shift into episodes of change or conflict. The paintings unfold as fragments of an open-ended narrative, while richly decorated surfaces progressively push the image toward ornament and abstraction.

In dialogue with these works, Jorrit Tornquist’s paintings and chromatic studies introduce a radically different yet complementary investigation. A pioneering figure in European color theory, Tornquist has explored the perceptual and spatial dynamics of color since the 1960s. His works reduce painting to the interaction of hue, light, and optical perception, generating chromatic fields in which minimal variations produce intense spatial and atmospheric effects.

Two ceramic sculptures by Bertozzi & Casoni complete the project as a physical counterpoint to the paintings. Through an extreme degree of verisimilitude, the artists dissolve the boundary between reality and illusion, transforming ceramics into a vehicle for reflection on consumption, transience, and materiality. Apparently real objects thus become perceptual devices that question the very reliability of vision.

Kuschnir, Tornquist, and Bertozzi & Casoni articulate three distinct ways of constructing the visible: narrative, color, and hyperrealism. The project brings together different practices and generations to examine how reality is perceived, transformed, and rendered unstable.