Globs of archetypal paint swipes careen through 10 pictorial planes, like a bowling ball released through 10 consecutive pendulum swings and ran at a speed of 17 mph aiming to finish a perfect 300 game on December 04, 2004 at River Rand in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Traversing through a mix of past painting styles (hard-edge abstraction, color field painting, post-painterly abstraction and early 21st century neo-formalism), this exhibition’s paintings’ color, luminosity, texture, translucence and materiality are examined through an interplay of flat paint surface and thick impasto and hard-edge and visceral paint application. An interior dialogue/ sub-linguistic hollering float in the subconscious like entoptic images of the eye. Hand’s position and angle, pulse, grip, arm movement, the stance of the body, painting materials, condition of light in the studio and the size of the painting in relation to the size and shape of the studio were all considered before a paint swipe was executed.
By means of abstraction, the ahistorical paintings of the exhibition “The Pendulum Swing” are like visual fragmentation – or potentially reconfiguration of gestural figurative – which do not point meaning beyond themselves. No familiar representation or symbol. Just subverted individual aesthetic gesture through private iconography of a perfect game bowler/ impulsive-exacting painter. Because “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine”.(Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982).
