January 2011
Jake Longstreth, 'Matinee,' 2009, acrylic on canvas, 47 x 47"
'High-Def'
Geometric abstraction is alive and well in this group show of hard-edged paintings by Chris Corales, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Aaron Parazette, Don Voisine, and - surprise! - Jake Longstreth, a representational painter whose stylized, reductive landscape feels right at home here. "High-Def" refers, of course, to the TV broadcast standard; in this context, maybe we can interpret that title as reflecting the evolution of a visual style that is paradoxically both rational (no symbols up the sleeve, folks!) and, when colors and shapes spring to life, mystical.
In Corales's four "Gray is the Color of My True Love's Hair" pieces, small, gray binder board triptychs with black taped hinges suggest a marriage of artist book, pamphlet and collage, folding screen, and even architectural model (tiny Clyfford Stills and Barnett Newmans interspersed with wall drawings and paintings); the images are all scavenged non-art from daily life. Hurzlmeier flirts with casual facture in his three small "Geometric Symmetry" oils on linen, "Kete, Kast and Kist," their symmetrical, iconic images and succulent color palettes contrasting with the heavy linen weave and the pronounced paint texture. Parazette's nonstandard-shape paintings - circle, circle minus a chord, and square with clipped corner - reprise the shaped canvases of the 1960s and 70s, but playfully: "Color Key 16" suggests origami and wooden puzzles, while "Color Key 17," with its Op/psychedelic perspective grid, plays with flatness and spatial illusionism. Voisine's small paintings on wood also play with dimensionality in a sophisticated way reminiscent of Al Held and Josef Albers; the crossed, suspended overlapping black planes in matte and glossy oil imply a shallow space that is contradicted by the flatly painted color bars at top and bottom. Finally, in Longstreth's "Matinee" a big-box warehouse sits beneath a pale blue sky atop an immaculately mown lawn of plaid green grass.