Color I

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on March 16, 2013 at 2:58pm

Curator’s Comment:

 

Color I gives the impression of multiple picture plans spliced together into a newly enigmatic, compound work.  The pictorial landscape in the center section is fluid and amorphous, like an open sea an erupting squall.  I enjoy the small yellow tendril that appears to trail off from this more painterly handling of surface into the smoother geometric top piece.  The orange and red stripes on the neutralized brownish ground recede further into space, and offer a refined counterpoint to the more contrasted center.  Seeing the color and rectilinear shapes reassert themselves in the bottom section of the vertical triptych also gives the painting a harmonious and gratifying cadence. I also particularly respond to the piece titled Color XIV- Gravity.  The similar formal division of painterly treatments, between haptic textural surface and smooth flat space is quite interesting.  I see it as an aesthetic version of cognitive dissonance, or desire to placate alternating sensitivities about landscape.  I also view the thin plant stems as literally holding up the weight of a heavy, turbulent sky.