20 Nov A planar garden
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/85294-a-planar-garden
Alexandre is pleased to present
A planar garden, an intergenerational group exhibition organized by curator and artist Stephen
Westfall. Reflecting upon the boundless referential possibilities of planarity in painting, the
show will feature works by artists including Polly
Apfelbaum, Will Barnet, Alexander Calder, Suzanne
Caporael, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Suzan Frecon, Mary Heilmann,
Carmen Herrera, Harriet Korman, John McLaughlin, Odili Donald Odita, Joanna PousetteDart, Patricia Treib, and Stephen Westfall.
In Westfall’s words:
“I’ve long felt that we’ve needed to recalibrate our expectations of planar abstraction
to include its potentials for referentiality, memory, and play; in short, abundance. This
doesn’t have to mean a canvas teeming with incident. Planarity in painting implies
areas of color rather than an accumulation of marks, after all. But color and shape are
referential, as is the object of the painting itself. We can recall light and shadow, weather
and time of day, when looking at even color filling out a shape. A synesthete might experience flavor, scent, and even sound. A concert of flat colored shapes can reference a riot of
associations, humidities, memories of rooms, textiles, the silhouettes of flowers and birds,
and the trajectories of ships and jets. Even the perpendicular planes of seemingly reductive abstract painting draws us into a dance between distance and proximity. Think of the
far horizons embedded in the granular intimacy of an Agnes Martin painting…
…Not all planar art is painting. Planes can be cut out of sheet metal, or rolled out in
ceramic tablets. A stabile shows us planes in air. Above all, I think those artists who arrive
at a planar language are finding their way to a more pronounced engagement with architecture. A plane of color in paint, paper decoupage (which is how Matisse referred to his
cut outs), or ceramic glaze invokes walls and panes of colored glass. There is a material
idealization, if such an oxymoronic thing could exist. Planarity projects into a room rather
than offering a window or a doorway out of one. As with icons, planarity in modern and
contemporary art says the distances offered are actually present. So, here is a garden of
planes showing their plumage and cleared paths, their intensifications of objecthood, their
gestures in space, their areas and edges”.
Stephen Westfall (American, b. 1953) has charted a course between post-minimalist
geometries and a Pop-inflected awareness of a painting as a thing in the world. The
brightly colored diamonds, triangles and trapezoids in his most recent canvases are
conjoined into dynamic compositional skeins that seem to lean into space rather than
recede. Drawing on Caucasian and Navajo rugs, medieval heraldry, Byzantine floor tile,
early twentieth century abstraction, architecture and Pop, Minimalist and post-Minimalist
painting, Westfall’s abstraction is deeply acculturated while formally honed into an active,
perceptual immediacy. This is the first exhibition he has curated at the gallery.
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/85294-a-planar-garden