NYAB Event - "Revelation in Non-Objectivity" Exhibition

"Revelation in Non-Objectivity" Exhibition

Walter Wickiser Gallery

This event has ended.

In Non-Objectivity the recent works of artists Austin James, Anne Kolin, Magali Léonard and Susan Manspeizer are manifestly different. The unifying factor they all share, however, is openness to revelation, to what Mark Tobey termed “ the need for the universalizing of the consciousness and conscience of man.”

Austin James works carefully with crushed pigments, brushes and scrapers to create variegated surfaces suffused with ethereally irradiated colors. His paintings on linen and board brim over with immanent marks and forms. These are at once perceptibly distinct while appearing to relate to an energetic system cloaked with contingency, indeterminateness and mystery. References to a transcendent reality of some kind come to a head in each work as emergent universes appear to coalesce and disperse over, under, around and through the pictorial surfaces.

Magali Léonard’s acrylics suggest interplay between the contrasting organization of space that opens and closes while falling and rising and the rhythmic sequence of landscape. Intimations of relationships between mountain and water as well as other elements of nature such as between animals and plants and between clouds, trees and rocks are sensed through the Léonard’s use of reciprocal empty-full spacings whose cosmic liquid dimensions give rise to feelings of the sublime.

Anne Kolin identifies her empathic collage artworks as “bodies wrapped and enveloped in a new skin that will happen to be a place where chance, time and color can meet.” Skin, for Kolin, is an erotogenic zone. It is a psychic envelope, a sense organ in and on which dwell attachments, libido and destructive impulses. Her collages use reconstituted scraps of paper ripped from magazine ads, old newspapers and fragments from public billboards and posters that are then reworked with pigments and mixed media. The viewer experiences layered and often translucent surfaces that embody simultaneous, multiple, and contradictory readings.

Susan Manspeizer’s internal reflections on the shell as container has sparked phenomenological and formal visual inquiries that have in turn initiated internal conversations about she terms “the human emotions in life and their relationship to the cycles of life.” Her aesthetic vision includes shaping topologically complex three-dimensional structures as oil crayon is applied by hand to color and burnish the inside and outside contours of her sinuously bent wooden shapes. These are suffused with tender sensuousness and quiet mystery. Equally rapturous is an eerie sensation of the presence of once-sentient life that pervades her organically suggestive entities. Manspeizer’s opulently abstracted art forms have a tantalizingly otherworldly and even uncanny aspect that is moving and unsettling in equal measure.

In his collected essays “The Sense of Sight” John Berger notes
“ At the moment of revelation when appearance and meaning become identical, the space of physics and the seer’s inner space coincide: momentarily and exceptionally she or he achieves an equality with the visible. To lose all sense of exclusion; to be at the centre.” Non-Objectivity offers artworks that are uniquely impressive in how they speak as one so passionately, even eloquently to the viewer. Each work requires a commitment to looking and seeing what is there from what is implied and suggestively withdrawn from sight. Each work retains a quota of mystery, suggestive of levels of the unknowable that engenders the pleasures of renewed and invigorated viewing.