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15/10/2008

Jason Karolak

Massimo Audiello, New York

Massimo Audiello is pleased to announce Jason Karolak's solo exhibition, Rivers of the Same Mountain. The exhibition of new oil paintings by the artist will open on Thursday, October 16 and run through Saturday, November 29, 2008. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, October 16 from 6 to 8 PM.

Jason Karolak's paintings gravitate toward two distinct sizes—one large and physically engaging for the viewer, the other small and intimate in proximity. The abstract images are bold and painterly, giving us the sense that these paintings are the consummated happenings of a rigorous studio practice. Karolak's painted forms teeter between becoming and dissolving as they are built up in a kind of cathartic momentum. Patterns, progressions, and improvisations in these colorful paintings bring to mind mathematical sequences or the musical architecture of Bach's more celestial landscapes.

Karolak states, "the work is consumed with the process of painting but I would not say it is 'about painting.' Though formal and abstract, the paintings aim at a kind of impurity. I want the visual experience to bleed into the other senses, particularly the auditory and the bodily. I aim to find a kind of image within abstraction, one that comes from my mind and emotions, and that stretches outward to meet the viewer with association and feeling."

The title of the show, Rivers of the Same Mountain, makes reference to a passage in Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) written in 1810. Though Isaac Newton had already proven much about the hard science of color and light by the end of the 17th Century, Goethe insisted that there was more to it, that color is something that gets perceived and received by human beings. Goethe thought color was emotional and held associations, both biological and cultural. Through his experiments with color perception and his writing on 'color meaning,' he proposed a larger theory of connectedness in the universe, one that defied the empirical, scientific reductionism that was taking place in the West. Karolak's paintings have an affinity with some of Goethe's notions. Karolak's colorful paint-forms reach out and open up rather than close down and contain. The notion of the blending of the senses seems active here (for example, Synaesthesia is the phenomenon of a melding of sound and sight—hearing color, seeing music). Goethe stated that color and sound are not the same but very similar. 'They are like two rivers which have their source in one and the same mountain..."

Karolak received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 1997 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Recent exhibition venues include Rowland Contemporary, Devening Projects, and McCormick Gallery. This is his first solo exhibition in New York.

Opening reception on Thursday, October 16 from 6 to 8 PM.

Massimo Audiello
526 West 26th Street, USA- New York, NY 10001

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