Painting, Deconstructed

Painting is widely celebrated across UNTITLED, ART this year, including artists who test the medium’s creation process with alternative touches to its physical nature and dimension. They raise its flatness into sculptural layers, deconstruct its wholeness, or put its traditional mediums into test.

CONDUIT, Brad Winchester, 2019, Hand-woven linen, dye, bleach, oil and yellow cedar, 26" x 26" (James Harris Gallery)

Song to Siren, Leah Guadagnoli, 2019, acrylic, pumice stone, canvas, upholstery foam, insulation board, and aluminum panel, (HT Contemporary)

At Hollis Taggart’s booth, Leah Guadagnoli’s lusciously architectural and jubilantly pastel painting and sculpture hybrids yearn for a touch — however, do not. The artist constructs her canvas-based works by putting the modern art’s favorite material into highly physical affairs with other materials, most of which have industrial purposes, such as foam, stone, or aluminum. Their upholstered — and therefore unapologetically decorative — veneers are complimented with a color palette that spans dusty tones of pink, blue, or green. Guadagnoli’s abstract shapes are serpentine, sharp, and seductive, balancing soft edges with pointy corners, with cues from everyday design and social constructs on masculine and feminine behavior.

Seattle’s James Harris Gallery houses Brad Winchester’s “anti-painting” paintings, for which the artist tears apart linen surfaces, creating thin shreds of the material, almost gutting out its inner organs. Later, his healing process starts, weaving his threads into intricate forms to construct tactile alternates of paintings. Dying woven linen into bright colors, Winchester puts his painterly touch on the deconstructed and reborn material, which now lives between painting and sculpture, either tightly stretched into a wooden frame with tension or left draping with elegance.

El Apartamento from Havana exhibits Cuban artist Arlés del Río, whose paintings abandon oil and acrylic for eerie attraction of wax, covering his canvases with beeswax in traditional visual tropes of abstract or landscape painting. At first sight, the paintings seem far from a typical non-figurative experiment or a hazy skyline rendered in oil paint; however, a closer inspection reveals wax’s oozy and corporal texture, which coats surfaces with a wash of mystery and transparency, akin to a foggy window blurring the view outside. Where another painter would throw a splash of paint, del Río leaves a pile of lumpy yellow wax, which resembles a sun radiating its light over the mountains.

- Osman Can Yerebakan