Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/71385/geometry-under-pressure-don-voisines-paintings/
John Yau reviews an exhibition of paintings by Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on view through June 9, 2013.
Yau writes: "In the formal tensions Voisine establishes in his painting — as the result of a process, his elements never appear forced or extraneous — all kinds of feelings and possible readings come into play. This is one of the deep, abiding strengths of the artist’s best paintings; they become analogical. In the late 1950s, Stella squeezed space and meaning out of painting. Fifty years later, Voisine has found ways to squeeze both space and meaning back in, to open up what has been pronounced closed. Voisine wasn’t the only one to recover painting, but, unlike many others who rejected the narrative of painting’s death, he did it with a reductive vocabulary of hard-edged geometric forms."
Link to Post:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/abstraction-in-bloom/88294/
Xico Greenwald reviews two abstract painting shows on the Lower East Side: Don Voisine at McKenzie Fine Art (through June 9) and Bob Zoell/Wyatt Kahn at Rachel Uffner Gallery (through June 2).
Greenwald writes that Voisine's "oil-on-wood abstractions here have fastidious surfaces, harmoniously combining glossy, matte and semi-reflective graphite finishes... [Zoell] "crosses out words with colored blocks and then transfers the geometric compositions to metal supports where small paintings are made with high-gloss enamel..." Kahn's works, Greenwald continues, "are assembled shapes of delicately tinted panels stretched over with raw canvas. The works are arranged into bulging, wobbly rectangles with the finesse of an expert mason."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2013/04/paris-multiplicity-of-simple.html
Sharon Butler posts installation photos from the exhibition Emergence at Hôtel de Sauroy, Paris, on view through April 27, 2013. The show features works by Eve Aschheim, A.T Biltereyst, Katrin Bremermann, Sharon Butler, Claire Chesnier, Clem Crosby, Fieroza Doorsen, Amy Feldman, Yifat Gat, Kevin Monot, Erin Lawlor, Paul Pagk, Marine Pages, Andrew Seto, Radu Tuian, Richard Van der Aa, Don Voisine, and Michael Voss.
The exhibition, co-curated by Katrin Bremermann, Erin Lawlor, and Yifat Gat presents work that investigates "the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/elusive-geometries-don-voisine-and-ken.html
Carl Belz blogs about formal connections in the works of painters Don Voisine and Ken Greenleaf.
Belz writes: "As surely as images precede words, just as surely are formal issues bound to content, to enabling its articulation and earning its credibility, to testing and stretching its reach while acknowledging its limits and thereby tethering it to lived experience. In a modern world where all experience is problematic, those acknowledgments--of painting’s flatness, for instance--aim not inward to provide hermetic, self-indulgent, art for art’s sake contemplation, as we’re often told, but outward to provide frameworks for the expression of thoughts and feelings that we as beholders are in turn free to know, not in the way we know matters of opinion but in the way we know matters of fact, which is with the conviction that they are neither arbitrary nor merely personal but objective--and true."
Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2012/10/second-derivative/
John Haber blogs about the resurgence of abstract painting, evident in a large number of high quality exhibitions recently on view in New York.
Haber writes: "Call me old-fashioned. Just don’t call me derivative. That put-down dogged abstraction for a long time, back when painting was, you know, dead. Since then abstraction has roared back, but by quoting - often to the point of conceptual art. So surprise, for early fall has brought no end of sincerity, with pleasures of its own."
Link to Post:
http://www.squarecylinder.com/2012/09/don-voisine-gregory-lind/
David M. Roth reviews the exhibition Don Voisine: Paintings at Gregory Lind Gallery, on view through October 20, 2012.
Roth writes: "Each of these modestly scaled paintings, which range in size from 12” x 12” to 35” x 55”, is bounded on two sides by bright-colored stripes, most of which run horizontally... But rather than constrict perception, they open the paintings up, enlarging the amount of space they command by imparting the feeling that the central forms – as well as the stripes themselves – extend far beyond the edges. Included among these forms are obtuse black monoliths, like those seen in Richard Serra’s oil stick drawings; deformed crosses; and 'rivers' whose irregular contours look as if they were cut with a razor and a straight edge. The muscular energy they give off comes from the confusion of positive and negative space, where white and black shapes intersect."
Link to Post:
http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2011/01/its-plane.html
Photo walk-though of Plane Speaking "a 13-artist show that examines the use of planarity in abstraction. Valerie McKenzie curated the show, the fourth in a series of January exhibitions at her gallery that focuses on one particular aspect of abstraction."
Link to Post:
http://brenthallard.wordpress.com/2009/12/15/icons-of-color/
Brent Hallard interviews painter Don Voisine.
