NYAB Event - Carter Potter "Film Paintings"

Carter Potter "Film Paintings"

Julie Saul Gallery

This event has ended.

The third exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Carter Potter with a series of new works called Backpainting, our first since 2003. Appropriately titled, this exhibition embodies Potter's shift "back to painting" as well as his efforts to "paint from the back." As in previous projects, Potter references his hometown of Los Angeles in his choice of the film strip medium. However, Backpainting marks a stylistic reversal as Potter moves away from painting oils on top of film stills in his earliest work to painting on the backs of each still.

Potter was inspired to paint from the back when he closely examined the back sides of his older film paintings, noting the sculptural quality of the paint as it oozed from front to back. By reversing the location of the paint, Potter creates sculptural friezes with a Braille-like quality. Each work in the show is comprised of 10 horizontal strips (x-axis) and 10 vertical (y-axis). Potter basket-weaved these strips and painted each composition with a single color straight from the tube. He recycled some of the film stretchers, explaining why some appear to exhibit a differing color from the rest of the composition.

Potter's works are poised in an equilibrium of ambiguity, as neither photographs nor paintings. The underlying cinematic structure in each of his pieces is evident as he combines and layers film strips to create empty landscapes, intersected by bright splashes of activity. Potter seeks to create a complex and mysterious narrative in his monochrome works, comparing his pieces to "contests with previous and present 'Gods' of monochrome paintings."

Potter's work is featured in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Panza Collection in Lugano, Switzerland. Potter studied at the University of California Los Angeles where he received his BA and MFA.

[Imaga: Carter Potter "Cadmium Lemon" (2010) oil on 35mm polyester film 14 x 14 in.]