The Unseen Seen

Selected press by Peng Gallery

´´The Unseen Seen: Contradiction, Paradox, and Transcendence´´ featuring six talented artists from both China and the United States. This exhibition examines the roles Contradiction, Paradox, and Transcendence play in aiding artists in the quest to relate otherwise inexplicable human sentiments.

By removing identifiable symbols in her calligraphic-style abstraction, Jennifer Johnson´s art transcends the limits of written language and paradoxically communicates an aesthetic experience to universal audience. Similarly, Judith Osborne´s works visualize unseen forces within the human condition though the abstractions based on notion of the opposites. The painting of Cai Jin, with their characteristic red and heavy impasto, display paint her personal inner world, ´´expressing the inexpressible´´ though surrealistic artistic language. Scott Williams creates abstractions that exploit visual reality as impetus for the communication of human experiences. Paradoxically, Williams avoids appropriating what he sees, opting instead to ´´see´´ this world as starting point for an exploration of abstract though formal relationship.

Misung Kim´s wearable human hair headpieces flirt with concept of ´´contradiction´´ by suggesting that inorganic human hair, often looked at with disgust, can pride viewers with an optimistic and sensually fulfilling artistic experiences. Finally, Terence Alimario´s Tai Chi Chuan inspired a circular painted form exemplify the concept of transcendence by creating visual equivalents for the philosophical roots of one of China ancient martial arts.

Jonathan Wallis
Philadelphia, September 1998

 

...............................................................................................................

 

Trio A

Selected press by Peng Gallery

 

Classic Minimalism, as initially defined in the 1960s, was monolithic, involved with simple gestalts, and cool nongestural effects. Minimalism often had sleek industrial surfaces with neutral colors (gray, white, black) or simple spectral colors (red through violet). It was the last stand of Enlightenment thought, an essence, a reasoning however mute, pushed to extremes.

With hindsight, Minimalism can be considered the end of Modernism. For after this classic Minimalism, there was no viable, critical position for new artists to take root in, except the seemingly barren garden of endless repetition, an academy of nothing. There seemed to be only stasis in Minimalism´s blank codes. The only further reduction possible was the rejection of making objects for the embrace of the idea and often that idea was populist, or rejected the myth of the author, the genius.

In Modernism´s place, we came to a Postmodernist position: a stance that questions the location and institutionalization of sight; the gender, the stylistic narrative of history, and the class of the observer and the maker. No things, no objects, no sites are neutral; just the act of pointing out one position rather than another becomes a political act. In Postmodernism no single style, process, or mode of art is de rigueur. The ironic knowing quotation, the impurity of recombinant, overlapping styles is more often than not, the case.

These three artists, David Dawson, Matthew Kluber, and Priscilla Kepner Sage, may look superficially nonobjective, Modernist. However in their use, modification, and subversion of the syntax of abstraction, ironically they represent. All three intelligently draw on earlier movements and play off current art, extending them as they critique.

For example, Dawson´s new hard edged panels aren´t merely reductive, simplified surfaces but inductive and accumulative, loaded in content and reference. He will overextend a series of panes as in Say Orange Twenty Times so that the installation becomes not transparent but exaggerated, blatant. They all Look the Same from his Epithet series, literally plays off racial prejudices linguistically and coloristically. The length and the chroma of each panel, was determined by the literal length of the words ´´African-American´´ (black), ´´Caucasian´´ (white), ´´Native American´´ (red), ´´Asian´´ (yellow), and ´´Hispanic´´ (brown). They reverberate references to Andrew Spence´s work without the discrete drawing, Ellsworth Kelly´s random color panels, Byron Kim´s skin and Korean ceramic paintings, Ed Ruscha´s computer word blanks and Sherrie Levine´s simulated checkerboards.

To Kluber, abstraction ´´is but one of many stylistic modes in which an artist may work.´´ No longer a monolithic essence, abstraction offers many artistic options, which can be deconstructed and reconfigured in many ways. Painting no longer is an essentially transcendent field but rather a screen on which to project the artist´s ´´skeptical intellectual inquiry.´´ Kluber´s titles, as much as these statements, stress this position; one 1998 painting, for example, is called Every Posture is Mocked by Its Opposite. Kluber´s abstractions, created through an idiosyncratic process of fluid mark making collaged to supports, parallel some of the cool factures of paintings by New Yorkers David Reed, Stephen Ellis, and David Dupuis.

The repetition in Sage´s works is even more spatially illusionistic, more maximal then minimal. Coming out of the quilt tradition, Sage uses modern iridescent dyes and synthetic mylar to construct her hanging sculptures and reliefs. So while they are sewn, they look metallic or vitreous. They play off the systemic illusionistic space with real space, the organic and soft with the mechanical and the geometric. And the fact that they are sewn, ties with the heritage of women´s work, one of the tenets of early feminist work and Pattern and Decoration paintings of the 1970s. The fact that they are often suspended, connects their lineage to Calder´s mobiles and Keister´s
Sci-Fi constructions.

Each of these three artists quotes history while reinventing it. Or, perhaps more accurately, they quote histories while furthering them. They come at art from different vantage points which are sympathetic, eclectic, catalytic. Their works deserve our attention and a careful watchful eye.

Sid Sachs
Philadelphia, December 1998

 

...............................................................................................................

 

Reality Check

Selected press by Peng Gallery

In the history of American painting, Philadelphia is a city known for cultivating a long and rich artistic tradition of realism. The source of this tradition is often traced back to the founding of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, America’s first art school and museum, where many prominent proponents of realism studied, taught, or exhibited. Surrounded by these historical examples and influences, Douglas Witmer has been forging his own definition of realism, rejecting some doctrines and pushing others to their logical conclusions. With modest yet surprisingly rich canvases, Witmer demonstrates his research into the nature of painted reality.

Belying the seeming simplicity of the term, “realism” as a style is like much of reality—a slippery fish, a complex range of gray areas, rather than a mere binary opposition of this versus that. Traditionally, the term has meant an image painted illusionistically so as to reproduce nature faithfully. Since the advent of modernism, “realism” has become more ambivalent and can mean recognizable subject matter on the one hand (albeit perhaps a bit more “painterly”), or the abstract visual expression of an inner, spiritual truth on the other.

With his current work, Witmer plumbs the profound depths of the idea of “reality” and in the process maps out a further stylistic permutation. Here the “objectness” of the paintings—their overwhelming size, their insistent intrusion into our space—is held in tension with their “retinality” achieved by bold color and design, delicately handled surfaces, and the vestiges of illusionistic imagery.

In Philadelphia in 2002, we find ourselves physically present in the midst of this stylistic continuum. At one end is Charles Wilson Peale’s Staircase Group, hanging nearby in the American Wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This work, with its intention to “trick the eye,” emphasizes painted surface illusion; a very real, wooden step at the bottom of the work, however, aims to trip up the viewer in a literal way. The works in this exhibition cluster at the other end of the conceptual spectrum of realism. Here the elements of Peale’s paradigm are transposed by Witmer’s emphatic painting-as-objects with representational staircases depicted on their surfaces.

These stair step images are among the “failed” perspectival spaces of various receding planes that Witmer has culled from his study of early Renaissance devotional painting and uses as a metaphor for his own artistic and spiritual crises of belief. Given the human condition and our continual search for significance, it is in the active engagement, in the intentional relationship—Witmer’s engagement with his materials, our relationship with his finished paintings—where meaning may be discovered. Once he has gained our attention through the powerful physical presence of his canvases, Witmer invites us to join him in a leap of faith, to step up and out to a place we’ve never been.

Jonathan F. Walz
Philadelphia, April 2002