Press release - Optics and Perception: Prismatic, Patterned, Vectored, and Perspectival Approaches
Optics and Perception:
Prismatic, Patterned, Vectored, and Perspectival Approaches
Including artworks by:
Carl F Anderson
Ernst Benkert
Siri Berg
Claire Blitz
Ronald Davis
Nathan Ethier
Roland Gebhardt
Christian Haub
James Kelly
Matthew Kluber
Mokha Laget
Marilyn Nelson
Dee Shapiro
Andrew Spence
Robert Swain
Martha Szabo
Laura Watt
Sanford Wurmfeld
An Online Exhibition
November 19, 2024 - January 14, 2025
David Richard Gallery
New York, New York
(212) 882-1705
www.DavidRichardGallery.com
Click here to view the exhibition
The words “perception” and “optics” often make one think of the dizzying patterns, high key colors, and psychedelic images of Op Art from the 1960s and 70s. However, optical and illusory effects have been observed, recreated, and mimicked in paintings and drawings by artists throughout art history. Consider trompe-l'oeil, pointillism, optical color mixing, and hyper-realism as examples. Many illusory effects are intended by an artist to accurately portray dimensional space using multipoint perspective as well as modeling shadows, leveraging light sources and chiaroscuro to render the volume of forms and make them almost palpable. Each, a “trick” of the eye one way or another. However, there are also times when studio processes and color palettes, alone or in combination with other influences, create unintended and interesting, visually challenging imagery, sort of a process dependent “happy accident”. In some instances, it is not a complete image nor what the brain thinks it sees; hence it drifts into perceptual realms whereby the brain perceives and makes sense of what the eye is seeing. Environmental context of the viewing situation, multiple stimuli, and memory are all important influences on one’s visual perception.
This presentation of 36 artworks by 18 different artists of different ages and genders, from varying art historical periods and movements, each having unique aesthetic objectives and studio practices. They are brought together in this presentation to consider optics and various artistic approaches and practices whereby the final compositions can generate imagery challenging visual perceptions.
The artists are grouped in four categories based upon the device and /or process that delivers the illusory impact they either set out to achieve or stumbled upon by chance through a confluence of factors. The four general groupings, for ease of description and discussion, in this presentation include: Prismatic, Patterned, Vectored, and Perspectival approaches.
Prismatic approaches are utilized by these artists: Robert Swain, Sanford Wurmfeld, Matthew Kluber and Carl Anderson. Wurmfeld and Swain, former faculty at Hunter College in New York City, spent their entire careers immersed in color theory and systemic approaches to elucidating the interactions of adjacent colors, their optical blending in the human eye, and effect on visual perception. Kluber and Anderson leverage those learnings and combine the theory with influences from Color Field painting, digital technology, new pigments and materials, as well as novel supports and methods of presentation on digital monitors or circular canvases, respectively.
Patterned approaches that utilize combinations of geometry, color, grid compositions, mathematical algorithms for determining placement of the shapes and colors, repetition of motifs, as well as the layering of forms, colors and motifs can create optical effects via the artist’s process in and of itself and rigor of adhering to it. Dee Shapiro and Marilyn Nelson emerged out of Systemic Pattern Painting and their inclusion in an artist collective in the 1970s and 80s known as the Criss-Cross cooperative that also published an informative magazine with critical writings and images of the member’s artworks as well as other international artists and related exhibitions. Ernst Benkert, well known as an important and early participant in Optical Art (Op Art) in the 1960s and 70s, predated Systemic Pattern Painting. Benkert was a member of another important artist collective during that time known as the Anonima Group that included Francis Hewitt and Edwin Mieczkowski. Using grids of eye-popping hues as well as the reductive black and white palette, Benkert rigorously and systematically used geometric and spherical shapes to explore permutations in grids within grids or quadrants on a page that produced patterns that activated the eye and challenged the mind and perception of the viewer. Nate Ethier emerged many decades later and since 2012 has explored color through geometric and spherical forms in rigorous grids that are built up sequentially, one layer at a time, using thin translucent pigments to reveal both the process and history of the previous hues. Ethier’s work is an amalgam of color, patterning, and vectors to create a new generation of paintings and visual experiences.
Vectored approaches in the context of this discussion refer to the use of geometric bands and shapes of color and leveraging extreme angles of the internal geometry and perimeters of the composition to create, in conjunction with the use of colors (hot and cool hues for the visual push-pull effects as well as various shades and values), the illusion of volume and dimensional space. Several artists utilize this approach in different ways, including Ronald Davis, Mokha Laget, Claire Blitz, Andrew Spence, Siri Berg and Laura Watt.
Perspectival Approaches in this presentation can also be thought of as structural, sculptural or architectural which is, essentially, the literalness of perspectival geometry creating the perception of volume and space in the two-dimensional picture plane. The artists Roland Gebhardt, James Kelly, Christian Haub and Martha Szabo work and create their artworks with these approaches. Ronald Davis also occupies this space beginning with his iconic, very flat cast resin wall sculptures from the early 1960s with their highly illusory imagery of large cubes and elliptical discs floating in space. Gebhardt’s work is mostly sculptural, free-standing and wall works, using mostly wood, stone, metal and paper in natural colors or black and white. His practice has focused on voids that emphasize vectors and angles and the illusion of greater dimensionality and scale. Kelly was not known as an Op Art artist per se, he was best known as a gestural abstract painter for most of his 6-decade career. His early roots in geometry and late modernism in the 1940s frequently leaned toward illusory space and compositions. In this presentation, his drawings from the 1970s reveal his interest in “voids” and the optical quality of not what an artist draws, but that which is not included is what completes the composition. Haub, using thin strips of colored acrylic plastic glued together at right angles to create wall constructions, focuses on the translucency of color and interaction of cast shadows to create a wider color palette and larger scale in his constructions as the cast shadows reach far beyond the acrylic borders. Szabo used the chimneys, fuel tanks and skylights of roof tops to take the chaos of such structures and reduced them to basic shapes and forms to create her geometric compositions. Her deft use of chiaroscuro, observed from the sun at extreme raking angles during the fast transition to dusk provided a real image that she painted to capture an illusory and fleeting moment from a view out her window.
Associated Artist
- Carl F Anderson
- Ernst Benkert
- Siri Berg
- Claire Blitz
- Nathan Ethier
- Christian Haub
- James Kelly
- Mokha Laget
- Marilyn Nelson
- Dee Shapiro
- Andrew Spence
- Robert Swain
- Martha Szabo
- Laura Watt
- Sanford Wurmfeld
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