Скачать или смотреть JOSHUA LINER GALLERY - Oliver Vernon

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Renegade Trajectories, an
exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Oliver Vernon. This is
Vernon's third solo show with the gallery, and the artist will be present at
the opening reception on May 30.

Combining elements of landscape painting, figuration, and abstraction,
Vernon's practice pushes all of these categories beyond easy distinction,
creating a hybrid visual language all his own. "The picture plane is a
continuum of give and take," says Vernon, "where positive and negative
space give way to each other in rhythmic intervals. Energy oscillates and
migrates, initiating changes along the way. And color is a navigational tool
to guide the eye through the chaotic scape."

Vernon lives in the Sierra Nevada region of northern California, and
glimpses of these breathtaking vistas turn up frequently in his work.
However, landscape is never a subject or even backdrop, per se, but
instead a visual cue toward the expansive scale of Vernon's abstraction. In
many works, this takes the form of a wave-like torrent of arching
brushstrokes and cascading patterns that dominate the canvas, devouring
mountains, valleys, clouds, and the horizon, or nimbly swirling everything
into the overall composition. The effect is destabilizing, imposing an
abstract system on the more common notion of a fixed, physical reality—
landscape gives way to visual frenzy, flights of imagination, and
transformation.

In Renegade Trajectories, Vernon explores this dynamic with twelve
medium-sized acrylic on linen or canvas paintings and a suite of twelve
ink on paper works. The exhibition will showcase several large-scale
paintings, the largest measuring nearly 8-x-7 feet. In the painting
Excavation, a jagged cyclone of geometric shapes, architectural elements,
and quasi-anatomical forms swirl about a distant horizon, pulling it in or
ushering it forth. In the dramatic painting Flashback, this force takes the
form of an orange and violet-tinted flood, inundating the picture with a
chaotic rush of brushstrokes, graphic patterns, and semi-figurative
material. As the artist notes, "These incidents or events take place in
worlds within worlds. Everything is whirring with activity as parts of
systems engage with other systems in a state of constant flux."

In his works on paper, Vernon's use of Sumi ink imparts an even sharper
contrast of forces, of positive and negative space, in black, white, and
subtle gray scale. Hard-edged but somehow serene, these pictorial spaces
draw viewers into a spiral of connected facets (or dimensions)—cascading
flower petals, lozenge forms, pulmonary or lung tissue, honeycomb—
giving way to a brightening horizon beyond. Ultimately, the distinctions of
figuration/abstraction, figure/ground, are not the artist's primary interest.
In all of his work, Vernon is most fascinated by the dynamic interplay
between these surreally juxtaposed elements—in his own words, "not the
what but the how."

Reception Thursday May 30 from 6-8pm


TEXT COURTESY OF:

Joshua Liner Gallery
540 West 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

WEBSITE: http://joshualinergallery.com/
EMAIL: info@joshualinergallery.com
PHONE: (212) 244-7415
HOURS: Tues - Sat 11 - 6