Spring Ephemeral
September 19 – 26, 2015
The three large paintings in the exhibition all share the same image as a common referent; a thumbnail wikipedia image of wisteria blossoms. The plant blooms with pale bluish-lilac flowers in the first weeks of Spring. The thumbnail image was downloaded, cropped and modified substantially — resulting in a simplified graphic form which was then printed on acetate, projected onto canvas and painted in an oil-based lettering enamel.
The modification of the initial encyclopedic image enables the reduced graphical quality of the thing-itself to potentially act more as a universalized vessel for the conveyance of an open-ended referent. The simplified form allows the referent within the image to be painted by the artist as if it were a word; so that in painting the pared down form, the artist engages in building the painting as an incomplete description — continuously incomplete, yet awaiting a viewing subject to build in the missing ideational remainder.
Alongside the reduction imposed on the initial photographic representation, there are visual omissions resulting from the absence of color and detail on the monochromatic ground of these three large paintings. In “Untitled, (Spring Ephemeral 1)” the image exists in its most intact state, in“Untitled,(Spring Ephemeral 2)” the leaves exist without their previous armatures, in“Untitled, (Spring Ephemeral 3)” the image is pared down to just eight leaf-like forms.
Three small paintings consisting of detritus adhered on a painted ground are displayed adjacent to the larger works. Wherein the larger works the artist has set out to work with image on ground, here he has set out to work with found-object on ground.
