Neither Here Nor There (Or And)
March, 2018
Dispersion is replaced by integration. “Either-or” must give way
to “and.”
—Wassily Kandinsky
Like trying to describe a color with words, a painter reaches for
what is hard to make real.
Like color, a painting can seem to be more than one thing.
Kandinsky praised the capacity for “thought in two simultaneous
directions.” The way in which a painter wrestles with issues is hard
to pin down. There is no ever-reliable solution. A painting depends
not just on the painter, but also on the imagination and willingness
of the viewer.
Neither here nor there presents a collection of work that eludes,
disrupts, or transforms what seems familiar. The painters included
here engage distinctly with fundamental aspects of painting:
Stephanie Pierce, Gideon Bok, and Sam Bates make paintings that
shift time and place. Pierce paints time, intimate and incremental.
As light passes through a window, across a wall, she tracks its
movement, its warmth, refusing the easy, snapshot logic of a single
moment. Bates’ paintings begin with memories of specific places,
but as the work develops, the places widen. It is her intention that
viewers bring their own memories, experiences to the landscape.
Her earnest mark making transforms the specificity of place,
shifting the very ground beneath our feet. As Pierce and Bates are
to Nature, Bok is to human activity. Figures move about, play,
work or idle. Time passes and is compressed. Events unfold in a
single still image and the residual clutter fills the space.
Sam King’s paintings issue from a back-and-forth between
methodical routine and improvisational impulse. His color and
gesture simultaneously suggest and negate space, light, narrative,
engaging (and perhaps antagonizing) our instinct for recognition.
Murphy makes paintings that begin with a set of assumptions about
what a painting is. The process of working through these
assumptions leads to paintings that come up to the line of
sculpture, however, the world of color and illusionistic space seem
to deny or contradict the purely sculptural. Hellmann’s painting
sculptures similarly defy easy classification. Planes advance and
recede and slide and shift in ways that are both physical and
illusionistic. The result is a play between the fiction and the real.