Viewing Room
BRIAN CIRMO
DIANA COPPERWHITE
JULIE LANGSAM
JOHN A. PARKS
DANNY ROLPH
ALBERTO A. RODRIGUEZ
PIERS SECUNDA
LYNN STERN
JOSE A. VINCENCH
DANNY ROLPH
Danny Rolph's celebratory compositions construct their grammar of signs through material engagement and unprincipled investigations into the history of the "pictorial".
ALBERTO A. RODRIGUEZ
Alberto A. Rodriguez
Destruktion 2019
Destruktion, a term coined by Heidegger that influenced Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of Deconstruction, refers to dismantling a phenomenon in order to analyze and comprehend it. Through his scaled models of the interior space of a house in ruins, constructed from materials taken from the very house they reference, Alberto Alejandro Rodriquez deconstructs the metaphysics of ruin. His objects introduce a dialogue between a fragmented destroyed space and its metaphysical poetical component.
DIANA COPPERWHITE
"The artwork places us in an ambiguous temporal space, drifting from the present moment into a memory still struggling to take form. Her fluid bands of colored light slicing across weathered surfaces viscerally affect the viewer, reminding us that memory is not just an artifact of the past, but an animated phenomenon intensely felt in the present."
-- Robert R. Shane, Brooklyn Rail June 2019
The Brooklyn Rail – The Clock Struck Between Time (article link)
JOHN A. PARKS
John Parks takes on the subject of putti, those mysteriously animated infants who show up in so many classical paintings. Aping and often exaggerating adult behavior, they reflect the complexities of human interaction in ways that can be both charming and frightening. Parks paints them fighting, whispering, frolicking, dancing and flying as he explores and exploits their curious existence. Part artistic convention and part real children, his putti offer a tool for the painter’s imagination, a vehicle with which he can make explicit the powerful forces of attraction, deceit and violence while presenting them in a form that is often beguilingly playful.
In Constellations the artist uses putti to substitute for the traditional classical figures of the constellations, filling the night sky with combinations of putti interacting in all manner of improbable ways.
The New York Times - John, A. Parks: Paint and memory (article link)
JOSE A. VINCENCH
"Looking at Jose Angel Vincench’s geometric abstractions, one can’t help being stunned by all their luminosity — the light inherent in their gold, the most precious metal of all minerals, all the more so because of its symbolic import – and their innovative, idiosyncratic geometry. Gold is universally regarded as a sacred material, a symbol of transcendence, like the sun that rises above the earth it shines on. We cannot live without its miraculous light, and we value gold because it is imbued with light. It is a peculiarly abstract material, a sort of immaterial material like light. Gold is the most malleable of metals; working with gold leaf, as Vincench does, is to bend light to one’s aesthetic and expressive purpose."
-- Donald Kuspit “Ironical Gold: Jose Angel Vincench’s Conceptual Abstraction”
PIERS SECUNDA
"There is a horror and a fascination in something as apparently permanent as a building, something that one expects to last many a human span, meeting an untimely end."
—Robert Bevan, (The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War)
"All the shot works originate from the idea that the most valuable thing an artist can do is to record the world around them."
— Piers Secunda
BRIAN CIRMO
Like a novelist working in paint, Brian Cirmo invites the viewer to witness his characters’ moments of tenderness and turmoil. In the artist's series Gray Matters, the color gray figures in many of the works, even those ablaze with luminous color, but Cirmo also asks viewers to think about the gray areas that we navigate in our relationships or in solitude.
JULIE LANGSAM
Julie Langsam is a painter whose work explores the notion of the sublime within the context of utopian/dystopian ideas about modernist 'progress' and societal ideals. These underlying themes are present in works that embrace a variety of strategies and genres including landscape, figuration, abstraction, documentary photography, and architecture.
LYNN STERN
"A significant line, that is, one that really has a rhythmic emotional intensity, does not vibrate laterally but back, in a third dimension."
--Paul Strand
"My intention in these abstractions was to create forms that feel charged with light – almost made of light – and seem to be three-dimensional, moving back through space or projecting forward toward the viewer. Importantly, as in my earlier series, White Compositions, I wanted to de-materialize the scrim of cloth so that it felt more like an apparition in space than like actual matter. "
--Lynn Stern
