Peter Plagens “I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts”
Nancy Hoffman Gallery
This event has ended.
The exhibition, entitled “I Don’t Give a Damn/Every Moment Counts,” derives from Plagens’s painterly ruminations on the autumn of an artist’s life, which lead in two diametrically opposed directions. “On the one hand,” Plagens says, “I’ve been around long enough to understand that a lot of superficial, attention getting “stuff,” now seems pretty unimportant. I find I don’t give much of a damn about it. On the other, I see from my--let’s use the euphemism ‘mature’--vantage point what the country-rocker Jerry Jeff Walker called ‘the bend in the end’. I know that life is short and getting shorter. So there’s an urgency afoot with me about getting done what I feel needs to be done, especially in the studio. Every moment there counts.”
Plagens’s recent work includes large, loose-edged grayish shapes centered on an almost white ground. “I arrive at each shape improvisationally,” says Plagens. “I like to go at each painting in layers, starting with a mass of roughly made pencil lines and then getting more and more careful in the execution as I go along.” The various gray shapes are both invaded by, and spill out into the form of, smaller line-and-wash configurations with bits of color in them. On top of each of the grayish shapes sits a hard-edged, full-chroma “color badge.” The color badges offer startling contrasts to the overall informal qualities of the rest of the paintings’ surfaces. “The contrast isn’t intentionally symbolic,” the artist says. “It simply has to do with that old chestnut that what’s on the canvas or the paper is simply me--contradictions, dualisms, certainties, uncertainties, inconsist-encies, awkwardnesses, occasional insights, and everything else. There’s no getting around that I’m a card-carrying existentialist who thinks the universe is held together with chewing gum and baling wire. It’d be hard for that opinion not to seep somehow into my paintings.”
Since Plagens joined the gallery in 1974, his abstract vision has consistently explored emphatic figure-ground relationships, quirky compositions that pit elegance against clumsiness, and an ongoing concern with color derived from his twin inspirations, 15th Century Flemish painting (he lived in Belgium for almost a year so he could study it closely), and Hans Hofmann. (“Not the push-pull pedagogy,” says Plagens, “but just the beauty of the paintings.”)
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Schedule
from January 20, 2011 to February 19, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-01-20 from 18:00 to 20:00