Oliver Vernon "Unexpected Occurrences"
Joshua Liner Gallery
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Created with acrylic and ink on paper, canvas, and wood, Vernon’s series of small-, medium-, and large-format works depicts his own highly idiosyncratic “Big Bang” theory. In the artist’s colorful vision of the cosmos, nature and culture collide (or cooperate) in the creation (or destruction) of the universe. Any questions of origin or outcome are overpowered by the sheer dynamism of Vernon’s images: a balletic interplay of protoplasm, cultural signs, body forms, geometric abstraction, and bravura brushwork.
In Sumi Gouache III, a progression of delicate aqueous blotches evolves into a solid network of bone shapes and contemporary graphic-design elements. In Pivotal Hotspot, these decorative elements are a soothing, ordered backdrop for the chaotic clash of wave forms—water, fire, lava, smoke, ice—embattled in diagonal swathes across the painting’s surface. Cross Fire III, a long, scroll-like work, depicts a smoky miasma of protoplasm and planets. Contained within space-age purple spirals, this dark mass bubbles against a background collage of architectural designs, snippets of printed Hebrew text, foreign money, and wallpaper designs.
Vernon’s quirky combinations of organic, mechanical, cosmological, and cultural elements teem with lively intelligence. Their intuitive grasp of the relationship between energy and matter, thought and action, also references wide segments of cultural production, including Native American art forms, contemporary Japanese graphic design, 20th century Surrealism, and New York School abstract painting. Vernon’s “cosmos” creates a fluid atmosphere where cultural material moves in and out of focus, amid other earthier dynamics. This metaphorical expanse also allows the artist to explore the “deconstruction and reconstruction of visual space.” According to Vernon, “Each painting has its own set of rules, or rather, the rules are being bent, broken, and ultimately formed within each painting. Color, form, energy, architecture, good, evil, flesh, and machine are lurking, never as physical entities but as transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos.”
[Image: Oliver Vernon "Hammerloom" (2008) Acrylic on canvas 66 x 56 in.]
Media
Schedule
from January 17, 2009 to February 21, 2009