Andy Denzler "The Sounds of Silence and Distortion"

Claire Oliver

poster for Andy Denzler "The Sounds of Silence and Distortion"

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Creating a desolate yet passionate narrative through color, time, and mystical topologies, Andy Denzler’s studio practice expands and skims the boundaries of both photorealism and action painting. Focused equally on technique and subject matter, he treads a fine line between these disparate styles with his own singular vision. By uniting the precision and nostalgia of realism with the bold dynamism and pulsating energy of gestural abstraction, the artist’s large-scale canvases create secluded, pensive moments that invite the viewer into a private, psychological site. Denzler’s masterful juxtaposition of dynamic atmosphere and meditative subject matter in his post-photographic, multi-layered environments are culled from the underbelly of the landscape bedrock of contemporary painting.

Known for his signature style of bands of pigment that alternate between static, thick marks and blurred, flowing sweeps, human figures remain always at the core of Denzler’s explorations. The deep, gestural strokes can read as fissures running across a façade, just barely revealing the hidden depths of these thickly painted works and leaving the viewer with a vague gnawing that we have missed something lying beneath the tumultuous surface.

The Artist begins his process painting each canvas in hyper-perfect detail, then rapidly blurs the canvas in sections, gently obscuring the underlying content. With a rewardingly rich surface texture, Denzler’s wet-on-wet technique perfects a fluid physical process that convincingly creates filmic motion. His challenge is to accelerate and decelerate the consistency of the paint while working continuously, incorporating sudden movements that generate moments of interruption, resulting in a rewardingly rich surface that protrudes out of and recedes into the image itself. The subsequent scenes go beyond the reconstruction of an image by empowering the canvas with a resonance that is generally associated with Abstract Expressionist masterpieces.

Despite his unique and modern style, Denzler looks to Art History for stimulation, yet he violates the conventions of the Old Masters to expand the boundaries of painting and create a dialogue between subject and process. Denzler has developed his own language of choppy, abstract strips that traverse the canvas to fill in the details lost in the shuffle of time and space. Drawing inspiration from other art forms, including new media, video art, and photography, Denzler often references poetry or films in the titles of his artworks. “I use nature as the source for my world,” says the Artist, “I use equal parts my developed painting vocabulary and my own identity. It leaves me very vulnerable, but it is an honest process.”

Denzler, who lives and works in Zurich, studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule and F&F Schule für Gestaltung, Zurich; the University of California, Los Angeles; the Art Center of Design, Pasadena; and received his Master of Fine Arts from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. He has been widely exhibited in solo shows across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has works in numerous public collections.

[Image: Andy Denzler "Touch" Oil on Canvas 47.24 x 55.12 x 1.5 in.]

Media

Schedule

from September 05, 2012 to September 08, 2012

Artist(s)

Andy Denzler

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