Designed to Please

The Clark Gibson exhibit running now at the Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Olde City Philadelphia until May 26th rang a lot of art history bells for me when I stopped by. The apparent simplicity of Gibson’s approach belies a greater complexity within. Gibson’s City of Gold, my favorite from the exhibit, appears above.

“What would our surroundings look like, however, if we allowed the multitude of components in any given object to take visual predominance over the whole image?” Gibson asks in his artist’s statement on the Bridgette Mayer Gallery site. Once I saw the phrase “multitude of components,” I thought Cubism immediately. But instead of presenting different facets of three dimensions across two dimensions, subtracting a dimension, Gibson presents cross-section slices of design on top of each other, adding a fourth dimension of time to the image; hence, the show’s title “Time Frame.” The neutral colors of Picasso/Braque-style Cubism also give way to vibrant color schemes. This bold color palette generates a different vibratory rhythm, almost a Mondrian-like interplay of lines. (Some of the boxes formed by the intersecting lines echoed Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie for me.) Gibson adds yet another rhythm to the composition with his rounded brushstrokes on the solid planes of color. These brushstrokes catch and reshape light in a way that reproductions can’t duplicate. (In fact, the postcard from the show featuring Gibson’s Honeydew tries to duplicate this light effect, but it looks more like a printing error than the real thing.)

Gibson’s design background emerges clearly in the lattice-like design of the paintings, which each have four to six layers of paint piled on top of each other. I was drawn to City of Gold because it has not only this firm design grid, but also because Gibson added little flourishes of red within the design. These flourishes and the lattice effect made me think of Jackson Pollock’s work, specifically his Blue Poles (below).

Pollock’s Blue Poles inverts Gibson’s scheme in that the flourishes dominate over the design. However, the design is still unmistakably there in the eight near-vertical lines running from left to right. Gibson’s concentration on composition and design recovers this aspect of abstract art lost in the popular misconception of “Jack the Dripper” and other abstract artists. As I said before, Gibson’s paintings rang several art history bells for me, which is a good thing. The rhythm he creates shares riffs with some old masters, but in the end, the song is all his own.

Waxing ‘Pataphysical

Taking to heart Alfred Jarry’s admonition to experience art in person more than in thought, I ventured out this week to the Bridgette Mayer Gallery to experience the current exhibit of works by young artist Ivan Stojakovic, “Global Nature.” (Stojakovic’s Neural Blossom diptych appears above [left half] and below [right half].)

Perhaps I have too much Jarry and Thomas Chimes in my head right now, but I couldn’t help but connect them with Stojakovic as I walked through the gallery and took in all the color and textures of Stojakovic’s work (reproductions really don’t do justice to the impasto technique or the colors). Jarry would have appreciated the catholic approach to imagery and technique Stojakovic employs. Pieces of technology, such as computer boards and fractal images, as well as biological forms, such as magnifications of cell structures, appear throughout. Thick ropes of acrylic paint comprising Net I and Net II (featured on the exhibit catalogue cover) mimic electrical wires.

At the same time, Stojakovic quotes elements of art history, such as Japanese woodcuts, as seen in the sprawling orange tree limbs covered in pink flowers networking across the two halves of Neural Blossom (shown above). Japonisme has intrigued Western artists since Edouard Manet, but Stojakovic modernizes it with acidic color, translating it into his personal, technicolor idiom (an image of furiously firing, "blossoming" neurons) while retaining the art history allusion. Jarry must be smiling down on this joyful celebration of imagery and color.

Chimes came into my mind because of this shared use of technological markings to create a private language. The contrast between Chimes almost purely white works at The Locks Gallery and Stojakovic’s color leaping from the walls of the Bridgette Mayer Gallery, only a few blocks away from one another in the historic area of Philadelphia, disguises their similar aims. Chimes consciously uses Jarry’s idea of ‘Pataphysics, i.e., an imaginary “science” playfully using the trappings of technology, but Stojakovic may be a subconscious ‘pataphysician. Of course, the true message of Stojakovic’s work may be that we are all ‘pataphysicians, willingly or unwillingly imbibing the technological flow surrounding us while hoping to retain the color and texture of imagination that gives life meaning.