Codes + Vital Signs and Thinking Dysrhythmia

Project Curated By Mariano Del Rosario

As taste and attitude change over time, so do the ways art is informed, filtered and shaped. Timelessness is an elegant concept yet problematic. To say that timelessness is the mark of artistic integrity is to posit that the universe is static or that it has stopped accelerating. This is not good news to purists as things come and go and are, at times, cyclical, and the only thing constant is change. At its core is the dysrhythmic state of painting, an irregular art pulse condition, which signifies contradiction and synthesis of creative ferment and robust manually produced art in a digital age.

In a fluid and complex world, artists feed on a great variety of sources, histories, and influences. The fundamental challenges of today’s art are in definition and making of meaning: defining its own transmutation and finding the right process. It is important to critically look at the direction current art has taken whatever the factor and context might be —whether to celebrate life or to lament the horrors of war and the ecosystem— for much of painting created after 9/11 is no more than visual confectionery that only goes so far as to delight the eyes and numb the senses.

Eight remarkable New York-based painters, by contrast, take on mundane objects that through material interventions and processes shift from a recognizable mode into one less definable, resulting in objects that tend to sit between classifiable elements. Abandoning the doctrinaire and restrictive diets of the 60s and 70s formalism, contemporary abstraction surges and loads up on low and high tech regimen, absorbing all manner of things into the infinitely mutable space of the canvas. Yu Okuzono and Nadege Morey share emblematic, linear, and geometric iconography in their paintings, but are poles apart in context and culture. Alison Tirrell addresses media materials and strips newspapers of their purpose as journals or mediums of news, while Christopher McGill delivers a gritty tableau infused with memory and literary allusions in his well composed canvas. Arlene Hutcheson creates color permutations and nuanced surfaces in ways that give new meaning to abstract lyricism. Amalia Piccinini, vanOs, and Seo Hyung Yoo locate their practices along the interface of elemental abstraction and representation. All navigate the ambiguous, personal and often sensuously surreal, they deal with alternating forces in a collision —synthesis and rupture, absence and presence, concealment and revelation, innocence and knowledge, strength and vulnerability— in relation to worldly and experiential subjectivity. The painted objects acquire new aesthetic roles, while retaining vestiges of their former more utilitarian lives.

They are proof positive of a city in flux where every generation is particularly so and more likely to continually gravitate to something new. One can argue that only through conceptual irony will the blurred boundaries of collective and individualistic styles slide into dissolution to become the order of the day.

Among many things, the works presented in this project question our perceptions not only of the systems inherent in art culture but also of the world in general.

Mariano Del Rosario is an artist and professor based in New York (USA).