Art Basel

Telling Time presents a selection of new work by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Luis Gispert, RJ Messineo, Willa Nasatir, Jacolby Satterwhite, Torey Thornton, and Kon Trubkovich that collectively depicts qualities of luminescence through different hours of day and night. Each piece in Telling Time visualizes or records an individual moment, marking temporality through warm or cool colors to convert or translate light. Adeniyi-Jones presents a West African aesthetic through his stylized figures floating in seasonal environments with repeating patterns rendered in vibrant tones. Gispert’s composite-like works meld seductive imagery with acute subtexts that typically revolve around beauty, artifice, and socioeconomics. Messineo’s paintings are like visual calendars, observing singular moments and marking perennial changes through a range of colors and pictorial propositions. Nasatir renders disparate objects to recontextualize their meaning, creating filmic themes that connote suspense through their incoherent arrangements and color combinations. Satterwhite explores the visual dialogue of consumer and gaming culture, as well as themes of queer theory, relating a broad, shared experience through surrealist imagery. Thornton explores medium and communication, context and interpretation, distorting the function of materials and the perception of colors, and through this process, they locate the significance of words and visual language. Drawing from deteriorated VHS footage and recorded history, Trubkovich’s work reflects moments warped by both time and an antiquated technology that inherently degrades and eventually disappears.