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29/5/2015

Robert Swain

Minus Space project space, New York

MINUS SPACE is delighted to inaugurate our new ground floor gallery location at 16 Main Street, Ground Floor in Dumbo, Brooklyn with a solo exhibition of new, large-scale color paintings by NYC-based artist Robert Swain (b. 1940). This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

For his exhibition Color Energy, Swain presents an immersive set of three new nine by nine foot paintings, in which squares of pure color are arranged into grids that are subtly modulated by hue, value, and saturation. The paintings are Swain’s latest investigation into the color system he’s developed over the past five decades. The centerpiece of his system is a 30-part color circle. These colors, when combined with the attributes of value (the lightness or darkness of a color) and saturation (the pureness of a color), produce a complement of 4,896 distinct hues.

Regarding the development of his color system, Swain states, “I became interested in color in the early 1960s. There wasn’t a great deal of written information about it, but I work intuitively. I started to look at color and to make charts and experimental work trying to understand the phenomenology of color. I don’t look at the work as being objective. I simply look at it as a way of trying to get into the subject matter of color and to understand it through experience. And all of this was done visually. It wasn’t done mathematically. It wasn’t done in some kind of progression. It was simply done by painting color charts, looking at them, and deciding in that moment of looking if they were correct or not.”

Swain continues, “Color is a form of energy derived from the electromagnetic spectrum that stimulates our perceptual processes and is instrumental in conveying emotions. In some instances, color is culturally encoded, projecting content through symbolism or associations. The origin for such references are found in the way that the energy (wavelengths), from a particular color, generates feeling; a physiological change produced by the wavelength (energy), of a particular color or colors. The energy which emanates from green is distinctly different from the wavelengths that define red. In some cultures, pure red is associated with danger. Feelings and attitudes created by the aggressive, radiate energy, which is unique to the red part of the spectrum. When pure red is altered, its emotional attributes change, as in the stability associated with red earth colors, or the whimsical fluctuation produced by pink. In this sense, color transmits feeling(s) through the perception of energy (wavelengths) from the electromagnetic spectrum. Freed from cultural restraints, red can be experienced by itself as a phenomenon, which possesses substantial content. When red is placed next to green, the contrast is heightened, as M. E. Chevreul has observed, and the experience resides in the energy generated by the convergence of these unique spectral wavelengths.”

Image: Robert Swain, Untitled, 9×9-6X1, 2015 Acrylic on birch panels, 9 x 9 feet / 275 x 275 cm

Opening: Sat May 30 6pm

Minus Space
111 Front Street, Suite 200, New York
Wed - Sat 11am to 5pm

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