Jun 2024
g r a d i e n t s , g r i d s , g r o t e s q u e s
Something important has been stirring around the studio, new ideas about how to work and a growing desire to work larger and more loosely. Although I continued to write about the grotesque this term, I paused it in my studio practice to focus on painting and developing my own vocabulary of abstraction. I have found a number of ways to create and distort grids to generate dispersed fields that are both structured and fractured, unified and distorted. In addition to continuing to work with color gradients, I have also been focusing on very close color values to quiet down the level of visual activity.
Whether ruptured or pristine, these layers of grids and gradients might be thought of as philosophical images of the mutable and composite world we find ourselves in, or of the mutable and composite persons we find ourselves to be. It is a way of suggesting the infinite and intimate perfusion of everything into everything else.
In different ways, the artists I have written about over the last three terms also work to encourage a perception of reality as vast inter-permeation: the carved trees and air-sculptures of Giuseppe Penone, the architectural inversions of Yoko Ono, the date and year atlases of On Kawara, and Philip Guston's images of self-as-Klansman.
There is no such thing as material … We are nothing but a play of the light. Medardo Rosso
New applications for the notion of gradients was an additional project this term, particularly with regard to language and gradients of meaning. A succession of clear synonyms can slowly, stealthily transport a reader from an originating word into multiple, divergent, even conflicting senses. It seems this circles back to the grotesque! I have been searching for how to turn this word-project into a painting-project.