Cheryl Hazan Gallery, New York, NY, 20th Sept 2018
Cheryl Hazan Gallery
35 N Moore St
New York, NY 10013
adagio; 76cm x 76cm; enamel on aluminium
slapstuck; 76cm x 76cm; enamel on aluminium
understood; 46cm x 46cm; enamel on board
Chegford Canyon; 100cm x 100cm; enamel on aluminium
Mondrian’s dream debased.
Implausibly, given the end results, the mental starting point for these paintings is the utopian purity of modernist painter Piet Mondrian’s work and the architecture of his peers. The paintings are an attempt to reconcile this to the ungovernable chaos of humanity and highlight the gap between theory and practice.
Take a perfectly composed orthogonal world rendered in primary colours, black line and white plain. Then introduce humans and witness the erosion, compromise, undoing and adaptation that ensues. Balance starts to teeter, secondary succeeds primary, straight lines get bent and lofty ideals become clunky pragmatism…welcome to the world in which we live.
This world is presented in these paintings from duel viewpoints. The objective overview like that of cells studied under a microscope, and the view from the field, the experience of moving amid the fray.
Frequent cropping, layering and masking, along with the use of gloss and matt finishes and various modes of representation lend the paintings the appearance of collage or montage. They could be mistaken for either, but they are entirely painted and nothing is cut or pasted on to them. These qualities, borrowed from the art of collage, help to generate an active surface that fidgets and shifts like the subject they represent. Modern life increasingly presents us with fragmentary images and juxtapositions of things eaves-dropped, glimpsed and incomplete.
The shapes of people, their stance, gesture and gait, are articulate, emotive and often hilarious. The universal language of pedestrian requires very little, if any, translation across cultures. The criteria for the arrangement or choreography of these protagonists are entirely formal and aesthetic and any narratives and human relationships that might emerge are accidental and predominantly the creation of the viewer. They are a welcome by-product of the relationship between painter and audience.
In most cases the titles of the paintings are place names, there to compensate for the lack of any detailed rendering or even suggestion of place in the picture. In other cases, the title is there to harmonise with the image or inflect or reinforce it.
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