EUTOPIA

Tom Motley & Liz Trosper

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Tom Motley & Liz Trosper
FLUID DIALOG
Bernice Coulter Templeton Gallery, Fort Worth [link]
January 16-March 8, 2018

Motley and Trosper collaborate in an age-old painting tradition that has largely fallen out of favor, a material call and response.  While vastly different in method and style, formal fragments bounce across the gallery and the result is a splashy dialog. Motley’s larger works act as topographical spaces: simultaneously an electrified plane of light and a rich, stained color field. Paint as a material is the actual subject of Trosper’s paintings, rendered through several generations of digital and liquid applications. This palimpsest process heightens the ephemeral nature of an object historically associated with permanence.

~ Sara Cardona
images courtesy of the author

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George Grammer

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George Grammer, New York Nocturnal, n.d., oil on canvas, 35.5 X 25.25 “ Collection of Judge and Mrs. B. Michael Chitty

 

George Grammer
Full Circle 
Bernice Coulter Templeton Art Studio [link]
Texas Wesleyan University, Ft. Worth, TX

Grammer’s 1950’s night paintings of Texas coastal derricks and refineries helped develop his masterful touch for suggestive twilight. The later New York Nocturnal softens industrial lights and edges, even blurring colors as if a precursor of a Gerhard Richter technique. It is an exhilarating image, with the insertion of a bold horizontal streak, like a speeding Yellow Cab.

Sunflower Night has the contour-clarity of an Aubrey Beardsley woodcut. The tall stems, looming high above the viewer, dim into ever darker tones. Yet Grammer retains significant warm hues in the elliptical flowers, letting them project forward from the rich blue sky.

~ Thomas Motley
photos courtesy of BB Moncrief Wiese and Carter Bowden, Curators
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Mauro Martinez

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In The Event of A Water Landing. Oil on canvas. 66"x66"

Mauro Martinez “In The Event of A Water Landing” Oil on canvas. 66″x66″

 

Mauro Martinez
In The Event of A Water Landing
Oil on canvas [2016]

Anchored by a fractured protagonist lost in a Bacon-esque pretense of depth, Martinez establishes a familiarity of painting as angst reflector. The ruptured figure in this delicatessen of discontent dissolves amidst a riot of graphic and painterly styles generating a necessary confusion: a frenetic saccadic movement. Familiar fragments of cautionary travel symbols quasi-pleading for pseudo-safety amplify this visual unsettling, generating a malcontent nausea. Declaring the distress of the physical flâneur (damn the static Internet voyeur) recalls the painful physicality required for painting and cultural absorption, a discomfiting reminder of our existential anxiety mirrored by corporeal un-belonging.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the artist

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Michael Mazurek

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Michael Mazurek “Triptych” 2016. photo by Kevin Todora

Michael Mazurek
“New Paintings”
BEEFhaus, Dallas [link]

Mounting appropriated doors as painting smacks of post-modern irony: a high-modernist parody: a conceptual-minimalist “fuck you” to a system that revels in cleverness. Nonchalantly distressed by nonstandard usage the panels bear scars and lackadaisical attempts at concealment. If personified it is tragic, begging acute angles of painterly inspection, as though appreciation of casual violence against objects parallels social insight. However, if the surface is catagorically accepted it presents an improbable poetry: inaccessible and of higher authenticity than meditated actions. The piece, unwillingly, exemplifies the noumena gap, questioning our occasional correlationism at odds with our systemic un-knowing of daily life.

~ Ryder Richards
photography by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the artist

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PLURAL: Matthew King

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09 Matthew King Paintings from the 1970's installation

Matthew King
Paintings from the 1970’s
Grin Gallery, Providence, Rhode Island [link]

I think you mean the 1960’s

A night out with a lover listening to contemporary renditions of the songs of our past, clutching each other’s lustful intentions with a live sound track fulfilling our shallow needs. A good cover band, one that captures the original essence of music is something to experience even though the players are necessarily secondary to the music they copy. King, like many cover bands before him, offers us the flatness of the 1960’s shadowed in clippings of the 70’s  with the simulated currency of the now: nostalgia.

~ Ian F. Thomas
images courtesy of Grin Gallery

Response to ideas in “I think you mean the 1960’s” 

With a blatant attribution to the past the artist co-opts a proven stylization tuned for ready reception: a theoretically safe well-trod territory, which can become either a platform for innovation or a feedback loop of comfortable retro-banality. Nostalgia repackaging co-opts externality as individuality, shifting away from originality into the role of re-contextualization: a risk presuming relevance over inconsequence by re-enacting the paradoxical past-perfect. Equally as interesting, the re-enlivened content that is readily consumed is necessarily (gratefully) lacking the original animating spirit. The zombified pastiche is welcomed with nostalgia’s selective forgiveness and empowered anew by faux-familiarity.

~ Ryder Richards

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Grace Weaver

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GW_MatchPoint

Match Point, 2015

Grace Weaver
Teenage Dream
Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York [link]

Flesh, cast in warm limelight, is tangerine-strawberry in Teenage Dream. Grace Weaver’s paintings offer extracurricular mise en scènes, where bodies behave like stage props when they support, form, and “move” in response to their individual environments. In Match Point, buoyant arms and legs swoop around the painting’s periphery as if they were curtains unveiling the adversary of a higgledy-piggledy tennis game. Although the artist credits pop-songs to her narratives, the gestures of its jelly-like citizens also suggest they are in cadence with a Gladys Nilsson landscape or Matisse’s Dance II; the figures bounce to a lyrical beat.

~ Amie Cunat
images courtesy of Thierry Goldberg Gallery

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