NYAB Event - Patrick Berran and Jack Henry Exhibition

Patrick Berran and Jack Henry Exhibition

Storefront Ten Eyck

This event has ended.

Patrick Berran and Jack Henry layer information and materials in a practice that recalls geological strata. In this show, boundaries between painting and sculpture collapse to reveal complementary processes of investigation.

As a painter, Patrick Berran works from the surface forward, leaving traces of prior activity to create a rich, dense history of his investigation. Luscious glazes and abrupt changes in color temperature and value resonate with our understanding of the visible world and its internal coordinates in our psyches. Oil and acrylic are subjected to a variety of forces including gravity, reinforcing the comparison with landscape in general and the operation of sedimentary, igneous and metaphoric geological processes in particular. The surface of the work is highly seductive. Despite their beauty and metaphorical references, the work insistently returns to its identity as painting and its place in the history of painters who have worked with this vocabulary including Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, Larry Poons and Helen Frankenthaler.

The artist writes, “I am interested in a visual experience that is found from slow and repeated viewing. Within the practice of painting, I create imagery that extends beyond its materials and into an emotional viewing experience where a painting is allowed to become more than just painting. As the observer and instigator of my own work, I create an environment that nurtures, yet aims to agitate, my painting process. I work to define a uniform space in which all attributes of the painting process equal the entire image created.”

Jack Henry is a scavenger, an archaeologist, and an alchemist. He collects discarded roadside objects and debris, which he brings back to his studio to embed within layers of pigmented gypsum cement. The sculptures are cast in wooden molds that result in freestanding columns resembling sections of earth cut from an urban landscape. The purpose is to create a sense of wonder from the banal, often overlooked, objects that can be found scattered throughout any post-industrial town in America. The addition of liquid causes these materials to shift so that their ultimate arrangement involves chance operations. Once the mold is removed, surprisingly results are revealed, which the artist reacts to, amends and strengthens. The resulting “core samples” are strikingly beautiful and repellent at the same time. They are literally and figuratively landscapes made from trash, reimagined through an aesthetic of Minimalism.

The artist writes, “The casting process is reliant on chance. Though the objects and color palette are selected beforehand, many of the details such as the pockets and cavernous areas that appear throughout the sculptures are spontaneous. Once the column is removed from the mold, I am left with what is essentially a four-sided abstract painting. I then work into the sculptures by chiseling, applying paint and sanding away layers of the surface. With each piece I try to find a balance between what may be considered beautiful and unaesthetic so that the sculptures may serve as a metaphor for the qualities that can be appreciated in post-industrial landscapes. It is not my intention to condemn the wastefulness of consumerism but to look at it as a matter of fact. Through a certain lens, poetic moments occur when objects depart from contact with people, decaying and coalescing to create monuments to cultural disaffection.”