NYAB Event - “Nocturne” Exhibition

“Nocturne” Exhibition

Parallel Art Space

This event has ended.

“Night time sharpens, heightens each sensation

Darkness stirs and wakes imagination

Silently the senses abandon their defenses …” – Andrew Lloyd Webber/Charles Hart

The tradition of night painting, or pictures concerned with the effects of light at eventide is long and storied within western art history, and includes such luminaries as Rembrandt van Rijn, Georges de La Tour, Francisco Goya, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. It is perhaps Whistler, with whom the tradition of Nocturnes in painting is most synonymous. Together with forbearer Turner, his night paintings (with their focus on aesthetic arrangement and the ephemeral qualities of light) directly influenced the development of Impressionism and prefigured the age of non-objective, art-for-art’s-sake, abstraction. The underlying structures of Whistler’s dark and atmospheric works were tied, albeit loosely, to the tenets of observational, landscape painting; a girding to regular, repeated convention that connects them to another discipline of night-focused art.

The Nocturne in music is most closely identified with Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin, who wrote over 20 of them in his lifetime. Generally inspired by and meant to conjure the phenomena of the night, these compositions all shared a loose structure of variegated melody atop a regular, repeated tonal scale. Visually, it is this combination of both the arbitrary and the methodical that forms the second selection criteria for the works within this show.

Including dark tones and geometric proclivities, the works and thematic disposition explored within Nocturnes focus largely on light; it’s reduction and absence in relation to the experience of viewing. By no means meant to define the artists or their interests, Nocturnes, and the attendant concerns within the theme, offer a singular point of entry toward the further consideration of these artist’s works. Whether engaging in strict, hard-lined reduction or exploring the intersection between abstraction and observed reality, the artists here are each traversing their own lines of inquiry. Wholly composed and viable unto themselves, these works make resonant night music, both individually and in concert.