Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
Catalog | April 2017
Smith&Jones
Smith&Jones
April 2017
Felix Culpa: Pop-Up Shop
Curated by Joseph A. W. Quintela Art by Curtis Frank
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
Press Release: Dress Your Walls in Genuine Felix Culpa Felix Culpa will unveil a pop-up shop at Brooklyn's Court Tree Collective (371 Court Street, 2nd floor, Carroll Gardens) from April 19th to April 26th. The opening reception will be from 7-9pm on April 19th, and thereafter showings will be by appointment. Pop-Up Shop is presented by Smith&Jones Art (sales@smithandjonesart.com) When Andy Warhol co-opted the production model of modern industry to proliferate his artwork, the Factory must have seemed the obvious moniker for the site of his production. No other building better symbolized the mechanized world or its ideal of cheap and perfect reproduction. The digital world has no such brick-and-mortar space. Instead, Felix Culpa--an art brand modeled on bespoke, boutique retail--finds its abode in the virtual spaces of the World Wide Web and the boundless imagination of its sole proprietor, Curtis Frank. As such, Felix Culpa eschews the tired and unsustainable valorization of unceasing production and expensive, wasteful inventories. Instead, the brand focuses on made-to-order, timelessly-crafted instantiations of images generated on a dedicated web page. How does it work? It's simple, really. A website is
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Smith&Jones  a fluid medium: a blank canvas for content with customizable style elements such as color, font, and spacing. But additionally, every website is framed by a banner, footer, and navigation bar that consistently surround this content. At Felix Culpa, Frank has smartly branded the latter while loading the former with a wide variety of wellcurated content. The result? A lavish red backdrop and the Felix Culpa logo surround any image loaded onto the webpage. When he is ready, Frank takes a screenshot and this is what he paints. It's the combination of well-curated content and consistent branding that makes the finished product unquestionably boutique. Indeed, the value added by this process might best be summed up with the suggestion that you don't just put a Felix Culpa on the wall; Felix Culpa puts the wall into your life. A consumer-oriented buying process is where the bespoke element of Felix Culpa comes into play. Avoiding the trap of art as hall of mirrors, Frank isn't interested in producing an endless inventory of paintings worshipfully devoted to his own aesthetic whims. Every Felix Culpa begins with a consultation, an opportunity for the client to impress their lifestyle and their living space upon Frank's careful consideration. It is from this consultation that Frank will create the content to be loaded onto the Felix Culpa website in order Sales and Inquiries | sales@smithandjonesart.com Â
Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
to generate the screenshot that begins the painting process. Don't confuse this client-driven customization for the frivolity of Paint-On-Demand. Frank retains all creative control after the initial consultation, a stipulation that insures a product universally recognizable as genuine Felix Culpa. As with every dress designed by the greatest names in Haute Couture, every Felix Culpa is perfectly fitted to its collector, but unmistakably part of a far greater collection. Equally innovative is Felix Culpa's tantalizingly simple pricing model. With a minimum of 18" on the shortest size, every Felix Culpa is priced at a $1 per square-inch. While ensuring accessibility to the budding collector, this model provides for the imposing sizes demanded by seasoned buyers. Both will find a product that is well worth the time investment and asking price. Frank is a classically trained painter and his mastery of color and form is evident in every stroke of the brush. Similarly, lasting quality is provided by Frank's attention to sourcing materials of the highest quality. Every Felix Culpa canvas comes with a life-time guarantee, a practice befitting of a product designed to be passed through generations. When regarded as artistic enterprise alone, Felix Culpa is conscious of several of contemporary art's most meaningful tropes: Art as Arrangement,
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Smith&Jones  Art as Framing, Art as Transaction and Art as Social Experience to name a few. However, Felix Culpa does not stop at being an academic or intellectual exercise, it follows through to a marketable product with a value underpinned by honoring both fashion and form. If comparisons to the Factory seem premature, it is to be remembered that Warhol's very model is part of an unsustainable mode of production that is as in danger of extinction as the factories it engendered. The contemporary marketplace requires visionaries less concerned with simply becoming iconic and more concerned with providing artisan products imbued with a living soulfulness that is not destined for a landfill in 2-3 years time. It is exactly this kind of enterprise that Felix Culpa's timely entry into the art market announces.
Keywords: timeless, artisan, genuine, hand-crafted, made-to-order, bespoke, boutique, lasting, uncompromising, unparalleled, unique
Smith&Jones: www.smithandjonesart.com Felix Culpa: www.felix-culpa.com Court Tree: www.courttree.com Sales and Inquiries | sales@smithandjonesart.com Â
Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
Artist Statement Every Felix Culpa Website Painting begins as an idea. All the ideas live together on the website: it is both the source of and final destination for all the Website Paintings. coexist
alongside
without
any
importance.
the
The physical paintings digital
apparent
curated
content
heirarchy
of
Each unit of information is as equal
to another, whether it be a painting which has been completed and uploaded or an nascent idea which has yet to come to the same fruition. Each image is an invitation to discover more:
the
journey that ends in Felix Culpa begins with an outstretched hand.
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Curtis Frank
@MrDavidHockney #selfie, 2014 acrylic on canvas 30 x 78 x 1.5 inches
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
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Curtis Frank
Corrupt Homepage, 2013 acrylic on canvas 36 x 24 x 1.5 inches
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
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Curtis Frank
Looking into the Internet for One Minute, 2013 acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 x 1.5 inches
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
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Curtis Frank
Chess Game, 2013 acrylic on canvas 48 x 48 x 1.5 inches
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
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Curtis Frank
Running in Place for 30 Seconds, 2013 acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 x 1.5 inches
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
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About the Artist: Curtis Frank graduated magna cum laude with degrees in Classics and English from St. Olaf College and has been painting ever since.
A
persistent love for language and classical culture undergirds his works on canvas which incorporate modern elements of web design and image editing with acrylic paint. As the creator of the fine art brand Felix Culpa he has been crafting bespoke art to order since 2013. His considered
by
recently ArtPrize.
many
work
has
been
major
institutions,
most
In the winter he is to be found
in the studio, and in the summer at the beach. Felix Culpa can be found at www.felix-culpa.com.
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Felix Culpa: Pop-‐ Up Shop
About the Organizer:
Joseph A. W. Quintela is an artist, publisher, and art-organizer working at the fault lines emergent in the face
of
post-textual
and
post-
productive modes of living. With a particular excess,
interest systemic
in
material
collapse,
and
generative revitalization, his practice harnesses a fluency in a variety of media including paint, light, books, text, and culinary ingredrients. Solo exhibitions in New York have included Portrait of the Cast of You in Eye (Dumbo Sky, 2013) and FOOT | KNOTS (Project Space Envelope, 2012). He has organized exhibitions for Undercurrent Projects (Books Without Words, 2014), Terrazzo Art Projects (Se Cayo Todo, 2014), and the Brooklyn-based Pop-Up initiative Smith&Jones. Ongoing displays of his work are housed at The Strand, Central Booking (LES), and Salina’s Restaurant (Chelsea). (www.josephquintela.com)
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