Bruce Pearson
dal 13/5/2003 al 14/6/2003
Segnalato da
13/5/2003
Bruce Pearson
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
The paintings are color-charged abstractions based on text and image transformed to the verge of subliminal meaning. Elaborately constructed on carved and layered Styrofoam slabs, the creviced wall reliefs are overall fields of intricate patterning and optical rhythms. Gouache drawings on paper that relate to the paintings will also be exhibited.
''Our understanding of Pearson’s work can only truly occur over time, as our eyes slowly adjust to the forms and colors, and we draw on the mental process through which we turn symbols into language and language into meaning. ...meanings surfacing from the quicksand.''
Pablo Helguera, Tema Celeste
Bruce Pearson, one of the leading exponents of contemporary painting, will exhibit new work at the Feldman Gallery. The paintings are color-charged abstractions based on text and image transformed to the verge of subliminal meaning. Elaborately constructed on carved and layered Styrofoam slabs, the creviced wall reliefs are overall fields of intricate patterning and optical rhythms. Gouache drawings on paper that relate to the paintings will also be exhibited.
Pearson achieves a complex synthesis of structure, text, and images, combining calculated strategies with chance. Elements include the intersection of obfuscated texts with reworked images, various grid systems, and an associative use of color. The work accesses a wide intellectual and emotional range, spanning high/low culture and the banal and the sublime.
The exhibition features Pearson’s newest series, relating to encyclopedic information, based on fragmented images from an eighteenth century pictorial encyclopedia. A distinguishing feature of this work is a complex field in which no color is repeated. A filigree of topographical ridges maps the appearance of plant structure.
Paintings from an on-going landscape series include The Ridiculous Bodies of the Spirits, in which muted color abstractions seen from a distance resolve into water imagery. Ventriloquist, based on transformed photographs of reeds, references the frozen gestures of abstract expressionism. The bright, biomorphic shapes in Wiggle and Twitch are based on images of abstract paintings.
In other varied compositions, Pearson plays with symmetry and the asymmetrical. A Dangerous Game of Love and Faith, with its flipped text, becomes a complex mandala, bringing up associations of psychedelic patterns, Islamic prayer rugs, and Eastern Spiritualism. Cybergasm Machines and Male Hysteria uses lines traced from fashion and sports photography as a grid. With verve, the animated wavy grid and the exuberant color palette comment on the declarative title of Rock and roll is dead, the novel is dead, god is dead, painting is dead.
Bruce Pearson was awarded a Skowhegan Residency for Advanced Visual Arts in 2001. Recent group exhibitions include Seeing Red, Part II: Contemporary Nonobjective Painting, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York, 2003 and Paris in Brooklyn, Brooklyn in Paris, Galerie Bernard Jordan, Paris, France, 2002.
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
31 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10013
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 – 6: Monday by appointment.
For information contact Laura Muggeo (212) 226-3232