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9/9/2005

Bruce Pearson

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Essentially, what Pearson has done is to radically slow down his paintings, both in the way they are made and in the way that we look at them.…What is a great and all-too-rare achievement is to keep viewers hypnotically engaged as they puzzle out a painting’s gradually emerging complexities. Raphael Rubinstein, “8 Painters: New Work.” Art in America, 2003

Bruce Pearson, refining his signature style, continues to reinvent abstraction with increasing complexity and subtlety as he introduces new themes. Constructed on Styrofoam panels, the paintings are fields of sensuous color and intricately creviced surfaces, with visceral impact and optical effects. Pearson’s paintings, and related drawings, are based on text, reworked photo images, and abstractions that are woven together to the point of near indecipherability.

Found text, mined from the mass media and the Internet, provides the initial structure of each work, as well as its title, and documents the current cultural landscape. His new work is the most political to date.

Several paintings relate to perceptual change and altered states of consciousness. Uncovering facts they would prefer you never hear about presents oscillating bands of color and shifting shapes. Maybe evolutions going in reverse pops into 3-D, an environment of biomorphic forms superimposed on deep space. Other works recreate hallucinatory effects through the symmetry of mandala and Rorschach shapes including Nierika, which references the magical properties of mushrooms.

The fusion of pop and historical references creates underlying tensions. Rejection endurance lunch (the title refers to Hollywood) combines a grid-system, based on silhouette lines extracted from magazines, with the palette of Florentine fifteenth-century painting. The vertiginous color and fractionized surface of An effective low-cost solution for combating mind control mimic properties of Tibetan art. Encyclopedia 3 (Relative calm sounds of gunfire and footsteps sadly familiar sheds some light), with text from The New York Times, contains images from an eighteenth-century pictorial encyclopedia. Rendered in more than seventy shades of white, the tree of life, stars, the moon, and other Kabbalic and alchemic symbols, are barely discernable in 58 common indicators of UFO encounters or abductions by alien beings.

Establishing a different mood, lyrical works contain reconfigured images of water or foliage and evoke the transcendence of nature. Déjà vu more or less or slightly more, from a new series, relates to memory.

Bruce Pearson’s work has recently been exhibited in Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum; at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, LA; La Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris; the Miami Art Museum; and the Times Square Gallery, Hunter College in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut. His work is currently on view in Reading ‘Rittin ‘Rithmatic 30 Years Later, at the College of New Rochelle, through November 13.

There will be a reception on September 10, 6 – 8.

For information, contact Sarah Paulson: (212) 226-3232 or sarah@feldmangallery.com

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
31 Mercer Street
New York
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 – 6. Monday by appointment

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