ARTISTS: Mel Prest
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Mel Prest
My work explores unlikely color relationships that create energetically charged, odd, physiopsychological spaces.
I paint sculptural forms that collapse spaces and create optical puzzles. Interpolation, visual disorientation and vibration make the paintings shift and rumble in one’s gaze, as the lines break the picture plane, sliding down the side of the panel and over the edges. The accumulation of lines and color make the eye focus and re-focus and create a tension that is felt visually or emotionally. I use the shadows cast by compositions of multiple panels to stretch the painting into a three-dimensional object: perceiving the panel as folding into/ out from the wall. The wall space creates simultaneous readings of the painting: at first the panels appear singly, then the lines and color pull the panels together, forming one large painting. The paintings are meant to create a meditative and charged space, and are inspired by landscapes and rhythms.
The drawings are a new project, begun in 2005. They use the grid as a system to chart names and phrases. I assign a letter to each point on the grid, and then begin to draw, as I spell out names and map relationships. By turning names in to a series of painted, colored lines, the drawings create a knot or web of architectural space that becomes a visual representation of a place in time where these persons connect. Recently I’ve expanded this project to include specific experiences like a gathering of people or listening to a Led Zepplin song.