NYAB Event - Bruce Samuelson and Jordan Wolfson “Chaos”

Bruce Samuelson and Jordan Wolfson “Chaos”

J. Cacciola Gallery

This event has ended.

J. Cacciola Gallery presents Bruce Samuelson and Jordan Wolfson in Chaos. In this exhibition, featuring all new works, the artists create a way of seeing as well as showing what is being seen. The intertwined relationship between a two-dimensional surface and its three-dimensional experience gives rise to a third thing, which is not a thing, but a state, presence.

BRUCE SAMUELSON

Bruce Samuelson’s interest with the figure reveals itself more as an interest in, or an accumulation of shifting glimpses. Torsos and appendages turn and twist as a result of Samuelson’s search for a formal resolution that seems determined to remain open to the flux of process and discovery, the work being developed when an organic structure is suggested by chance. The work begins without premeditation, but with chaos. Samuelson takes the body as a starting point. He is exploring his materials, his subject matter and much more.

Samuelson constructs an alternate point of view to the body. His work jolts the eye with densely layered images. His strokes are sometimes bold, appearing almost spontaneous. His hand seems to have meandered across the surface, creating the unexpected and astonishing from what could have been an everyday thematic component. Samuelson’s work is about much more than depicting the body. These shards of images are the product of beautifully directed lines and a masterful control of color and texture.

Bruce Samuelson is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. He is represented in numerous public collections which include: the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, NY; William Penn Museum, Harrisburg, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Rutgers University, NJ; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

JORDAN WOLFSON

The work is highly iterative, unfolding as a series seeking to chart Wolfson’s modulations of perception. Each articulation of the given motif is a reinvestigation into a state of being. The focus of each piece may shift from an emphasis on form to one on space or light. While the work itself is made and can be viewed over time as a sequence, the various states are understood by Wolfson to occur simultaneously, not unlike different radio frequencies, all emanating from the same physical situation. Wolfson’s vectoral attitude of mark-making within each painting gives a forceful tactility and kinesthetic approach to the form and space, as Wolfson tightropes between chaos and order.

Drawing pervades Wolfson’s overall oeuvre. Functioning less as preliminary studies for paintings than as works in their own right, the drawings perform as vigorous forays into each situation, allowing for direct discoveries and responses. The energy of the mark ranges from a fierce velocity to a quiet, almost tender kind of searching. When a figure is introduced into the interior it fundamentally changes the experience of the space, bringing with it the possibility of being faced, of mutuality, even intimacy, raising the question of how desire changes the calculus in Wolfson’s painting.

Jordan Wolfson was born in 1960 and raised in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Yale University in 1991, after studying under William Bailey, Mel Bochner, Andrew Forge, and John Walker. Wolfson is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant and a purchase award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After living abroad in Israel for ten years Wolfson returned to the United States in 2002. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad and currently resides in Louisville, Colorado.