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8/5/2008

Todd Norsten

Cohan and Leslie, New York

We are pleased to announce Todd Norsten’s second exhibition at the gallery which includes a series of 7 new paintings and a suite of 10 works on paper.

Norsten’s practice begins with the photographs that form an ongoing visual diary. Like a digital sketchbook, he spontaneously photographs commercial signs, materials, objects and posters. Some of these will become the source for a small painting on paper. If after an initial treatment they develop a resonance, that drawing may eventually become the subject of a painting.

The images present a portrait of middle America, both Midwest and middle class, as expressed through the mundane detritus of objects, signs and language that it produces. The subtle brilliance in Todd’s work lies in his ability to balance the high and low. The humble origins of his subjects are employed as a means to investigate the esoteric tenets of modernist painting, and one prevents the other from becoming formally over determined, or too shrill in its cultural observance.

Ultimately the paintings are formal exercises which push the limits of mark making, and relish the possibilities of painting. Norsten achieves a fission by opposing rich, white grounds developed over time (it is worth noting that no two are the same), against more spontaneously rendered ‘subjects’. Although it could be said that the white surface is equally the work’s subject, a fact which reveals itself over time.

Front transforms the animated weather diagrams from the local 6:00 news into a slim catenary, bisecting the canvas with one elegant gesture. Ceaseless, Boundless, Endless Joy corrupts the insincere sentiments of a greeting card by reproducing it in block letters written in masking tape. On closer inspection the tape is actually a trompe l’oeil feat of brush and paint. The most recent exhibition in the work, titled JFK, reproduces a placard held by a member of the crowd watching President Kennedy’s convoy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, which Norsten photographed from a video on youtube.com. The hope in that sign, in retrospect, is as hollow as the aforementioned greeting card. But history aside, Norsten is also interested in exactly how this person chose to express themselves, through language, in a certain font, with a certain design.

There is a natural relationship between painting and writing. As a viewer, the tendency is to look at images as if reading a text, compiling signs that can be paired down to assemble meaning…It is this creative friendship between images and speech that informs the character of Todd Norsten’s most recent body of work in which the brevity and poignancy of images and utterances range from the bitterly critical to the supremely comical. His pictures depict thoughts that resemble thoughts themselves, uncertain, abstract, honest, and occasionally inappropriate.

Yasmil Raymond, “The Beautiful Irreverence of Laughter,” Todd Norsten, (Seoul, Korea: Arario Gallery, 2007), page 10. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Todd Norsten: The Masterworks, a 98 page, softcover book printed in full color. It is primarily a compendium of the diaristic photographs that inform all of Norsten’s work, and also includes full page reproductions of the 7 paintings in the exhibition. It is available from the gallery for $30 postage paid.

Todd Norsten is based in Minneapolis and New York City. He was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, and was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at Midway in Minneapolis and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea, both accompanied by fully illustrated catalogues which are also available at the gallery.

Cohan and Leslie
138 Tenth Avenue - New York
Amission free

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