Courtesy of the artist.

I’m driven by color—it excites and inspires me. As I paint, I’m conscious of the energies that colors possess, especially as agents of healing that can transform us. Color can change how we feel. I work fast and I’m always in motion, like dancing, I need space. Sometimes I work with paintings on the ground so I can come in from any angle. I love a translucent surface with depth to see through the layers into time and space. I try to reveal our natural source and it’s all there in the color.

ritakenyon.com

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The success of each of Kelly’s works hinge upon decisions that appear simple, which is where the magic lies in these paintings. Kelly presents the viewer with decisions that merge to create a special energy within each work. The quiet intelligence in these decisions allows viewers to immerse themselves fully into Kelly’s world. When viewing his works I always think of the planning process, what goes into making these. There is a great vulnerability in minimalism; a pressure to have the work succeed with the most basic of tools and decisions can be overwhelming. When success is achieved the reward is unrivaled. Kelly guides the viewer with his confidence and grace through shape and color.

Kelly’s surfaces and the physicality of the works are complex and appealing. The uniformity within his color fields are painterly, yet restrained. When you discover a brush hair buried amongst the paint it’s a welcome surprise and reminder of how hand made these paintings truly are. The subtleties and nuances that Kelly is able to achieve through works that are bold in nature is the mark of a painter that has joined an elite few.

As you look at the body of Kelly’s work that now stretch the course of a lifetime, you see a strong determination and singular vision that has developed throughout decades. His visual language has progressed, while maintaining the course and never compromising. His career as a painter and the outstanding works he has produced can only serve as a great source of inspiration for the next generation of painters.

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Courtesy of the Artist.

I was born in Russia but I live in Sweden. My art is the story of my life, it is my feelings that choose the colors. The main source of my inspiration is nature, where color plays the lead role.

larissaromanova.com

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Courtesy of the artist.

As an artist, my artwork comprises multiple dimensions in both aesthetic and educational values.  I try to emphasize the little nuances of what we see in our daily lives by using multiple mediums to accomplish this while educating the viewer.

I wish to educate the viewer of my work by taking advantage of the opportunity, but without the viewer knowing they are being educated.  Also, I wish to educate what “can be” seen even if it is not seen in reality. This is why my body of art work is very colorful and detailed, to show the little and often vague subjects we miss in the “blink of the eye.”

martharosecardotgreiner.com

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Courtesy of the artist.

Inspired by the clear vivid colors of my homeland, Australia, I approach a blank canvas in a state of excitement with no preconceived idea in mind. I splash, spray, drip, and move acrylic paints and ink over the sometimes textured canvas and images appear from within as the painting takes on a mind of it’s own. Color is uppermost in my mind as brushwork and palette knife shapes are added to create unique contemporary works. Most of these works are images of waterscapes, coral, and fish from our great barrier reef on the east coast of Australia.

lyn-olsen.artistwebsites.com

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Vibrant colors and piercing eyes drive my pieces. I love the impact of bright colors, and the joy they radiate. To have a blob of magenta and spread it alongside a bright orange delivers instant excitement and sunshine.

The amazing variety between individual faces fascinates me; how is it that only minimal changes in in proportions are recognizable to the human eye and determine likeness? The eyes give so much information; enveloping their roles as the windows of our soul. Our mouths manifest happiness, yearning for a kiss, and anger. In any moment, we are our emotion.

sabinepoppe.com

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Image courtesy of artist

Colors are my emotions that guide me through the real world. The real world is complex and full of pain. What I seek in color and space is the beauty which is hidden behind human sentiment. As a result of my quest for sensation, the world becomes much simpler, a lot more energetic, and beautiful. This is achieved by intensifying the significance of color. It is pure pleasure for me to generate ideas and work on images. My creations are not the imitation of the surrounding world but a memoir of reality, which is inseparable from human experience.

lonitsachichinadze.ge

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The American artist moved to Paris in 1949 and has lived and worked there ever since. Her early works, with thick brush strokes of pigment and strong gestures, were in the style of Abstract Expressionism. Then, in the late 1960’s she began to paint in a very different, more controlled, way. The time spent with each canvas and the application of paint underwent a remarkable transformation.

Matte areas of carefully considered shapes began to be arranged into meticulously studied relationships.  Months were spent honing and re-examining each area of distance and connection. This exhibition, of work from the 1970’s, gives us a beautiful, fulsome experience of these explorations. They are, fresh, confident, and timeless.

With barely ten flat colors, The Black Line shows us a highly complex depiction of space.  Jaffe has said she is influenced by cities rather than landscape and this is clearly felt in the hard edges and partially obstructed views of various forms. The blues and whites have curves and scallops. There are two linear shapes, one red at the top, one black with ultramarine overtones, dividing the canvas almost in half. Contributing an openness and balance, these lines nearly mirror each other at the top of the frame. There is a playfulness between the various colors. The pink shape coming down from the upper right seems to be a paler version of a darker red shape in the middle. The pale blue around it quietly turns into a sea green of a similar tone.

Crossing street markings could be an inspiration for The First Diagonal.  A triangle of lush rose with horizontal yellow stripes divides two areas of the canvas. Another striped area to the right breaks through the rectangular form with white and orange both heightened by trapezoids of bright cerulean.  Again there is a contrast, unified by an expert eye, of sharp angles and scalloped edges.

Upside Down-New York is a joyful interpretation of the rhythms and verticality of the city. The canvas is so cleanly proportioned, it almost has the look of a triptych. The left and right areas of many of these canvases have a life of their own. They frame and add movement to a more stable center. Texture has been added with translucent green and cobalt stripes under a large red rectangle on the right, wonderfully balanced by the dynamic flowing shapes on the left.

Jaffe’s love of geometry is matched by her explorations of color. The various large and small triangles of The White Line offer a color chart of dynamic warm and cool tones. Each color is changed, either receding or approaching, by its position to another. A bold off-white diagonal line, its curves growing more intense towards the bottom of the picture plane, connects them as a river does its disparate banks.

The prevalence of semi-opaque pastel colors of mauves, grays, pale green and blue, gives Sylvia’s White a softer presence. Three different black configurations provide an anchor to the floating structures around them.  Again, the activity of forms on the left and right edges echoes the equilibrium of relationships. Their position also extends the colors beyond the canvas’ edges in our mind’s eye.

Playing with the tensions between these magnificently colored forms, both curved and angled, Jaffe has invented a language of coexistence. She has brought us to a place that is refreshingly new but somehow, mysteriously, familiar.

By A. Bascove

tibordenagy.com

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Some years ago the artist was confronted with the startling and unexpected news that she had Stage IV colon cancer. This was in 2009 when she was at the age of 29. She began to question her practice, what it comprised, and what it meant to make it at all. Then while undergoing treatment as well as grappling with reminders of her own finite nature and that of all things, she began to perceive new kinds of internal imagery. She sought to try to represent and understand what these illuminating but mysterious visions could mean.

From the artist’s own statements on her work:

“Hallucinating for hours while under the influence of both mortality and morphine, the experiences I had were regrettably mystical for a logical person, and conversely liberating…I imagined myself flying at high speed, head first into a crystalline world of ideal geometries, all pervaded with benevolent illumination—the quintessential ‘Go toward the light’ image we’re so familiar with. As moving as this was, I was left with some unsettling questions about my internal experience, and actual real space outside my mind. I could not help but analyze, for example, why my brain would invent this charming, but conventional vision. What is the difference between real and imagined space? Were these images implanted in my memory by Pop culture, or were they a true picture of death?”

There is something of beauty, terror, and unknowingness in the forms she creates. They seem to unfold with a grace and logic however woven with an obsessive detail that eludes easy comprehension. They retain a sense of their own troubled, questioning presences—and indeed each structure and drawing is like an unsettling, vexing proposition, a possible form or meaning of a form whose origins and intent are unknown to us. Do they beckon us with benevolence and illuminating wisdom, or is there a sense of threat, a danger that lurks inside as well? The structures do not reveal themselves to us, but they persist like mind-bending symmetries and asymmetries that confound our expectation.

Image courtesy of ADA Gallery.

They are like depictions of life and life-forms, unfolding and expanding in a multi-directional splendor before us. Their structures are organic yet geometric, suggesting both interiority and exteriority. They are models of structures that could populate some monumental futuristic urban planning design, or conversely also represent the microcosmic flux of cellular growth. Some works stand upon their own built-in pedestals like irregular creatures perched on giant stalks on an unknown shore. They may appear as disembodied, stand-alone wings without a body, or geometric vortices that draw you into the winding logic of their folds, a partial stab at the infinite, a glimpse of a spiraling DNA-like beyond. Bednarek employs careful gradations of color in her sculptures that compound the layers of enfolding in her more volumetrically-centered works, and elsewhere displays spiny shocks of an almost neon brightness in her lattice-works of thin, interwoven strands of wire bending through threaded space.

The warmth of the hues and the more organic and inviting textures of woven canvas on the surfaces of her sculptures seem to spurn the monumentality and coldness of the more hard-edged modernist design that her work nonetheless owes an acknowledged debt to. They can also make one think (at least for this one viewer) of the sprawling architectonic graphic scores of the avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis and his pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (based on a design by Le Corbusier.)

But what of the nature of the architectural wonders and futuristic pavilions that Bednarek’s images and structures may conjure? They are themselves like a miniature, alternate world exposition mapping the unseen design of one mind’s imaginary—on one hand marked by a perhaps wildly fantastical futuristic thinking while also firmly couched in a sense of the ancient and distant past. The artist’s works are similarly free-floating possibilities of form may have once functioned as Ur-texts or keys to some possibility of the sacred—as links to the world of some forgotten god or gods housed in unusual dwellings of sand and stone that flicker in and out of our memory as from an unattainable dream.

By W. Ng

adagallery.com

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Faste refers to the pieces in the show as “protoforms,” a term which relates both to the experimental nature of making prototypes and also to the idea that while the shaped canvases on which he works have more dimension than a typical painting, they exist in the realm of planar-image and illusion, never actually achieving the fully-dimensional existence of free-standing sculpture. The fact that they appear to be about to do so is the source of their kinetic appeal. While Faste’s protoforms reference the tradition of “picture-as-object” pioneered by Frank Stella, the figures move beyond static representation into the realm of what is known commercially as kinetic styling—capturing the implied velocity of an object-in-motion and delivering the impression of energy caught in the act of conversion into material form.

Faste’s work has its genesis in image research; his work references contemporary trends in industrial and product design. Through careful study of contemporary culture, the artist has gathered a lexicon of repeated shapes and patterns related to the architectural, technological, and psychological trends his work explores. Faste’s multi-planar canvases are bent into three-dimensional representations of these forms, then gessoed and smoothed so that all canvas seams are concealed. Next, some sections of the canvas are masked, while others are air brushed with slick acrylic hues and shades, creating an illusion of depth reiterated by the play of color across conjoined planes.

Trygve Faste, Protoform Small Blue Yellow, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 6.5 x 16 x 2.5 in.

When finished, each of the pieces is given a title that references the specific colors that comprise its surface gloss.  One of the most interesting aspects of the figures is the implied prism outside the frame. The figures explore the ways lines emerging from specific but unrepresented points of origin in dimensionally organized space, and the way the angles these lines create catch and refract light. The relationship between color and form in each piece is both kinetic and dynamic. The effect Faste achieves is that of observing light in the process of being bent, as if he were able to capture the moment immediately preceding the transformation of light energy into perceivable matter.

Stills of Faste’s creative process can be viewed at trygvefaste.com.  They reveal that while it is easy to interpret Faste’s work as “futuristic,” to do so may be naive.  While his process is technologically sophisticated, the media the artist incorporates in his finished figures (wood, canvas, paint,) are relatively primitive. Seen from this angle, Lightspeed is a visual reiteration of the first (ancient) law of the conservation of energy.  Faste’s work suggests that everything we consume originates as particle and wave. It suggests that matter is merely energy manipulated, through the process of design, into material forms intended first to stimulate, and then to satisfy desire.

By Beth Russell

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