pocket geometry

Double Top, 2012, acrylic on linen, 42 x 68"

Don Christensen

Ille Arts

Don Christensen's paintings combine errant geometries, perspectival leaps of faith and a palette that ranges from creamy pastels to zippy amalgams of mulberry, citron, baby doll pink and pollen yellow. His current exhibition of paintings and painted objects, titled In The Color Pocket at Ille Arts in Amagansett is a testament to the chimerical. It also exudes a palpable joyfulness that is intoxicating.

L to R: Double Top, 2013; Blatt, 2013; Sweet Top, 2013

Christensen's canvasses evoke a sort of radiant symmetry, though they are not actually symmetrical nor do they quite mirror any of their component parts. But they feel cooly proportional, with multiple vantage points and shifting perspectives that manage to bounce the image field about like a moving target.

The large paintings (there are four large works in the installation) flirt with a version of trompe l'oeil geometry in which physical space is both dimensional and flat. The resulting abstract illusionism seems almost an accident of its creation. Foreground and background slip back and forth without one or the other exerting primacy over the pictorial space. Tilted planes morph into trapezoids; patterns flicker like teetering wedges of plastic; and color and form gently wrestle inside -- and outside -- of the realm of subject matter.

Opposing Causes, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 76"

Buoyant and weightless, Christensen's spatial disjunctions are just weird enough to challenge ordinary logic. Their dreamy theatricality and torqued perspectives tip the viewer inside the paintings, as if falling into that proverbial rabbit hole. The subjective nature of his color choices yields a multitude of associations, from cartoons to tapis to carnival arcades.

clockwise fr top: Amalfi Table, 2013; Effy-Option, 2012; Translator, 2013

And just when you think you've caught your balance, the artist tips everything on its side with paintings on table tops, step stools and other utilitarian objects. Kissing chevrons, irregular polygons, and radial targets, diamonds, pyramids and stripy, prismatic facets dance across surfaces. Set perpendicular to the walls, their tops hang face forward, an amalgam of pattern, decoration and the painted surface as object.

The tables hang cheek by jowl in Christensen's East Hampton studio, colonizing wall space like migrant gypsies. They are hard-edged and mostly hot in tone, merging flag-like motifs with ornamentation and coordinate geometric systems that swell across the image field. Like coats of arms, the imagery is at once heraldic and playful as it commingles among the history of its supporting structure.

L: Sweet Top, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 60"; R: Barky I and II, 2013, acrylic on step, 14 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 20"

The tables exist in multiple, parallel universes to the paintings, celebrating intuition and the mechanical, fictitiousness and domesticity, and folklore, tradition and a variant of body modification -- like tattoos -- as they hug the walls.

I wonder if Jasper Johns, who famously said "Take and object. Do something to it. Do something else to it," has been whispering in Christensen's ear.

L to R: Genie Vaz, 2013; Maldive, 2013; Nosey, 2013, all acrylic on board, all 14 x 13"

Just a couple more days to see the wonderful show -- Don Christensen, In the Color Pocket, at Ille Arts.

paradigm shift

Amagansett: suddenly the coolest place in the world

Mary Heilmann, Kurt Gumaer, Seating Arrangements

ILLE Arts Seating Arrangements

curated by Mary Heilmann

Don Christensen, Songster, 2012, acrylic on wood table

It's nice to be surprised -- especially when it seems like there's no possible way to get it on in a way you haven't already considered a thousand times. Witness the transformation of sleepy little Amagansett, now the reigning champion in what is -- at least for this moment -- the East End's own Bushwick. It's fun and fresh and worth the long lines of beach traffic to get there.

Tucked inside a brief driveway off Main Street, Sara De Luca's new venture, ILLE Arts, offers crazy fun and varying degrees of comfort from this summer's break-out curator, Mary Heilmann. Selections here include Daniel Wiener, Don Christensen, Diane Blell and Kurt Gumaer as well as Heilmann's own hybrid seating units and succulent, crispy clear paintings.

Below, Daniel Wiener's weird and wonderfully incongruous painting/sculptures morph in between dimensions, Mandelbrot sets, and those trippy oil spills we used to watch before Uriah Heep concerts.  

Daniel Weiner, Plumbline of Disaster, 2010, Apoxie-Sculpt

Don Christensen's table paintings are a revelation -- so simple and perfect, and offering such satisfying solutions to the conundrum of 2 vs. 3 dimensions.

Don Christensen, Chicago Hoops, 2008, painted wood, furniture, hoops, wire

Kurt Gumaer, Webby Single bench, 2012, Pex tubing and painted plywood

Dan Colen at Karma

Dan Colen, 2012

 


And then! On to the newest of the new, book store and gallery, Karma, reincarnated from their west village location at Downing Street. Here, they are also tucked away, just a few steps from Main Street in a space that is big, flexible, and filled with cool.

And to cool off even more, check out Dan Colen both in Karma's gallery space and the adjacent lawn (above), dotted with chunky, sittable M&Ms -- hulking rocks painted in rich, candy-coated color.

More candy inside...

Dan Colen, Dead Flowers, 2012

Not unlike the confetti paintings he initiated after the death of his friend Dash Snow, here Colen provokes a literal mash-up -- in this case of mashed fresh flowers that are ground into the canvas. The results, a sort of visual epiphany that mingles aroma and detritus, violence and beauty, sweetness and despair. Colen is a balladeer -- given to poetics -- and, as such, well suited to the bookish Karma, one of those one-of-a-kind places for one-of-a-kind books and art, now in Amagansett. 

Dan Colen at Karma, 2012

Colen picks through the disenfranchised -- sifting through cultural throwaways and things in which any inherent significance has been eroded or disconnected from its origins -- and reconstitutes a visual language. His works can be transformative, elegiac -- even somber. (No somberness here!) 

His readymades possess the sort of urban poetry where meanings shift from ambivalence to certainty and from the poignant to the precarious. Above, his torqued park bench is an ode to imbalance -- urban, and a little madcap.

Not your typical bookstore

Watch for Adam McEwen's book signing at Karma on Sunday, August 19, 2 - 5pm 

Scott Bluedorn's 

Neoteric Fine Art

 

And then there's Neoteric Fine Art, now exhibiting Design + Function which includes works by the owner and curator Scott Bluedorn, surfboards by Stephen Jumper, as well as skate decks, textiles, jewelry and other outside the gateway buyables:

Neoteric Fine Art, Design + Function

Bluedorn is a surfer-traveler-artist-entrepeneur-jack-of-all-trades sort of guy whose gallery occupies a storefront on the highest order -- a vintage building situated directly on Main Street in Amagansett.

  

Victor-John Villaneuva, 2012, beads, resin

 

Below, Bluedorn addresses a chair with fisherman's nets and ropes -- all found among the marinas, streets, and beaches here. 

Scott Bluedorn, 2012

In the sister space across the hall, Bluedorn and co-curator Mark Wilson (check out Wilson's and partner Claudja Bicalho's awesome variety store, Lazypoint, just up the street) have assembled works that are cheeky, inventive and super seductive. 

Mark Wilson, Bear Medallion, 2012, digital print on canvas

Wilson works in a range of materials and idioms that bounce from the giant bear above, (a boy scout badge decal) to the sumptuous 17th century Persian carpet inspired oil paintings (below) he hangs on the wall or lays directly on the floor like actual rugs.

Mark Wilson, Persian Painted Rug, 2012, oil on canvas

Other works are equally sympatico, darting from artist-designed tables and chairs to driftwood configurations and oddly useful objet of all manner.

Ryan Bollman, Buoy, 2011, ceramic

Amagansett Village...best Sunday afternoon in a while.

rock n roll on newtown lane

Harper's Books looking good; Jane Huntington's Reclaimed Bunny #2, (above), 2010, C-print

Open for the Stones V2

Harper's Books

curated by Kevin Teare

Kevin Teare, Child of the Moon, 2012, oil on mylar

Bravo Kevin Teare, curator extraordinaire of Open for the Stones V2 at Harper's Books in East Hampton. Teare, a veteran of both the music and art worlds, has orchestrated quite the round-up of artists-cum-musicians, or vice versa. 

Mike Solomon, Kick and Snare, 1992, Plasticine and powdered pigment

Above, perfection from Mike Solomon -- waxy imprints of form and function. The performative and the static. Very cool.
 
Teare seems to be one of those people that's living at least 4 or 5 lifetimes simultaneously. Large works on paper on view here seem to pulsate behind glass enclosures. The syncopation is divine. Like many of the artists here, he's also a successful recording artist.

From Stuart Sutcliffe's inky collage to Tara Israel's chilling Hank 3 images, Teare's compilation offers a glimpse into the double lives of some of our most heralded artist/musicians. Check out some of the works:

Steve Miller, Against Ideas, 2000, pigment dispersion and silkscreen on canvas

Don Christensen, Goose Step, 2012, acrylic on wooden step stool, wire

           Stuart Sutcliffe, Untitled Hamburg Series, #15, c. 1960-62                    Liz Markus, T: Art forum Ad (Clemente); B: Art forum A                                                                                                                                   Ad (Polke), both 2012, glitter and collage

If not for a life tragically cut short at just 22 years old, surely Stuart Sutcliffe would have developed into an artist among the pantheon of British greats.

Peter Dayton, Wipe Out, 2012

a group of us, Murdered to Keep Us Safe, 2012 and Bethany Fancher, Harlem

Bethany Fancher, Indie Rocker, 2009

Other wonderful works by Ron Nagle, Jameson Ellis and Pat Place are not to be missed.

Open for the Stones V2 will be on tour through 2012, stopping in New York City and then off to parts unknown. You can check it out at Harper's Books through June 25.