PDX in "Best of VOLTA NY" Review
VOLTA NY is a refreshing reprieve from the chaotic onslaught of art presented by almost every other NYC art fair. It seems someone at the top heard our collective grunts and cries of dismay at the impossibility of coming away from any of the more massive art swap meets with anything other than a headache and stinging retinas. VOLTA is an invite-only fair that requires the galleries to put together single artist shows, making for a cohesive experience, at least as far as each booth is concerned.
Having circled around the show a few times and returned for a second look at the work that captured our attention, here are some selections for the most intriguing work in the show, in no particular order:
Ian Toms of Season [Seattle, USA]
With his aggressive array of paintings bristling with youth angst and vitality, Toms seems to be a punk rock blend of Steven Parrino bumping into Christopher Wool in a seedy back alley. Stark white canvases have been emblazoned with bold passages of spray enamel and oil paint. Metallic silvers and rich blacks compete for dominance across surfaces pitting misty, spray applied pigments with hard-edge, taped-off geometric elements. Here and there loose grids and other gestures have been burned into the surfaces as well. In front of the booth a table displays an array of violent looking home made daggers, rough carved wood and formed plastic, lined up in an inviting array that begs the viewer to choose their own weapon. Toms is certainly operating within a known and artistically traveled subculture, but finds clever ways to keep the work feeling raw and fresh.
Michael Zelehoski of Ethan Cohen New York [New York, USA]
The grey area between painting and sculpture is an aesthetic venue many have passed through, but it is one that few have lay claim to as their aesthetic home. In painstakingly extracting the facades of known objects and introducing them into the two dimensional realm via meticulous inlay, Zelehoski not only hovers between sculpture and painting but between each simultaneously in transforming the experiential tangibility of his subjects. It is almost as if the divide between perceptual and real space no longer exists. One of the more impressive works shows two materially sturdy and enticing painting stretchers floating inches apart from each other within the available image space of the booth wall. Having been cut into their essential shapes when viewed in perspective and reassembled into their new home within the excavated drywall, the artist creates a work in dialogue with both the lived and perceived physicality of these at one time pedestrian objects.
Patrick Bernatchez of Battat Contemporary [Montreal, Canada]
An all black rider strides towards you in slow motion on his helmet-clad steed, emerging from the ethereal void of a snow covered nowhere. The silent work is displayed on the wall in small format through a beautifully preserved film projector, emitting that seductively comforting mechanical hum only a work on film can provide. On the facing wall hangs a large standing portrait of the rider, wearing a motorcycle style helmet and semi-futuristic looking expedition gear. The photographic image is printed in an aged style reminiscent of early tintypes in a move that confounds the viewer’s ability to place the subject within a discernable history. To supplement the existential premise of the work, the artist has included a handsome wristwatch preserved for viewing in a glass vitrine. Seemingly motionless, a peek at the provided information reveals that this watch is apparently ticking away the minute increments it takes to measure the time of a millennium.
D.E. May of PDX CONTEMPORARY ART [Portland, USA]
Opting for confident display of poetics and a keen eye for carefully constructed formal relationships, D.E May’s work mines the inherent beauty of architectural drawing and diagrammatic project proposals. Widely created on a fairly humble scale utilizing muted tones and subtle shifts of color, the artists work looks like a portfolio of unrealized structural relationships, left on the page to become configurations to be encountered by the mind’s eye. Measurements and ruler guided pencil under drawing play as important a role as the resulting forms themselves, laying the process bare while alluding to something more than naked geometric forms. The work made me think about Beaudrillard’s concept of the fragment’s inescapable reference to its former home as a part of the whole, no small feat for work so bare and concise in its nature of expression.
Clint Jukkala of Fred.Giampietro [New Haven, USA]
Evidentally a real painter’s painter, Jukkala creates works of vaguely recognizable abstraction in swaths of alternately textured paint. The work sticks to a theme of the frame-within-a-frame opening up to a space defined by its relationship to an implied horizon. One has the feeling they are looking through a room that opens up to an ocean view. The artist’s colors are reminiscent of the washed out look everything gets when you spend the whole day in the sun with no eye protection. Moving between sumptuous impasto and dry grounds of thin color, the work fluctuates between textural affirmation of the surface and depicting levels of deep space. The resulting forms reference windows as much as eyes in a compositional program that suggests a reflection of space back towards the optical experience of viewer.
Frank Gerritz of Pablo’s Birthday [New York, USA]
Avoiding the common pitfalls of dry geometric abstraction in his ingenuity with materials and creating inventive supports, Gerritz draws the viewer in with his recessive blacks set against stark white or reflective aluminum grounds. In the case of the metallic supports, upon closer inspection of the edges, one finds that the metal panels are actually hollowed out to receive the volume of black paintstick gestures that it takes to pull the pigment level with the face of the sturdy metal supports. Working from an empty support vessel, the resulting product reveals the reductive abstraction to be a complicated labor of additive love. His works on paper are equally evocative in their consciousness of relation to the edge of the work and the ability of the milky white of the page to house the deep black panes of obsessively laid graphite.
Mathieu Levesque of Galerie Trois Points [Montreal, Canada]
There’s something about the sides of a wall-based work that tells a lot about the care that was taken in completing the presentation of the resulting creation. In Levesque’s case, this is often where the magic of the work begins. In shaping his supports so that their edges are beveled away from the viewer and towards the wall, the artist is able to activate the edges of his work with bright pigments in such a way that the light reflecting off of the sides of his work creates a colorful halo delineating his paintings from their architectural home. Often leaving the faces of his work natural to their material or adorned with a contrasting color palette to their activated edges, Mathieu creates a conversation between painting, sculpture and architecture that is indifferent to which category his work most readily belongs.
The experience of viewing any art fair is something of a visual stimuli endurance test. The more of these we take in, the more we appreciate the planning that goes into creating a well-orchestrated fair. When getting so many galleries into the same space, it seems hard to avoid being overtaken by the volume of work presented amounting to intoxicating levels of ocular stimulation. VOLTA is keeping things classy with a nice new venue and a selective curation of invited galleries. The fact that they are each limited to showing one artist at a time also seems to keep the usual art fair clutter to a minimum. Though it is not as large as a show like the Armory, we feel that our selections would likely stand out given their involvement in any of the available fairs. If you missed it this time around, there is of course always next year, just be sure to come ready to have an experience. One suggestion would be to pack a coffee and an energy bar. A flask also wouldn’t necessarily hurt.
From NYC Art Parasites
(http://nyc-artparasites.com/nyc-art-daily/nyc-art-reviews/article-1629-2...)