NYAB Event - William Swanson " Architectonic"

William Swanson " Architectonic"

DCKT Contemporary

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In Swanson's acrylic on wood panel paintings architecture attempts to hold rein in a tumultuous battle with natural forces. Each presents a fictitious setting and fuses elements of nature, technology and architecture.

Holding to a belief that disaster can be a transformative process, SWANSON's spaces play with end into beginning as in all natural cycles. Floods of light and debris spin in and out of view in unraveled space. Remnants of buildings, infrastructure and dilapidated structures are charted out in a survey of the damage. These are potential scenes of disaster.

SWANSON's palette is a mix of deep blues, blacks and grays with contrasting hot pinks and warm acrid citrus. The paint alternates between loose floods of blended pools, streaks and harder edge flat planes of solid color mass. Concentrated masses of form gather in piles of teetering planes and surfaces.

In Trace Dispersal, a black field is bisected by crystalline planes of color. Outcroppings of rock drift like remains of a larger development; the scraps of earth barely provide footing for temporary structures, pipes and other human networks. In another new painting, a wide expanse of glowing space floods an indeterminate horizon. Structures such as banks of computer monitors and display units stand without any use or users; a collective energy of information is swelling in the atmosphere.

[Image: William Swanson "Trace Dispersal" (2009) acrylic on wood panel 33 x 65 in.]