NYAB Event - Jerry Madson Exhibition

Jerry Madson Exhibition

Caelum Gallery

This event has ended.

Motifs free a painter from having to come up with new imagery for each canvas so that he can devote his energies to executing his paintings, but finding an inspiring motif is sometimes the most difficult part of the process. Jerry Madson has no such difficulties because he recognizes strong motifs all around him in the natural world in Minnesota where he lives and works. From the plethora of life forms in nature, for each of his series, Madson culls just one and then thoroughly investigates it. The artist has done this multiple times with flowers and insects that are delicate and ephemeral, but for the current series he chose a reptile -the turtle- that is absolute opposite. Madson’s past choices always had decorative qualities such as the wings of a butterfly that easily integrate into his phantasmagorical world.

The turtle, while its shell does provide a decorative pattern, is a ponderous presence that dominates the pictures. The artist quotes from earlier motifs in order to further emphasize the turtle’s pictorial dominance, but his conceit is that the turtle is magical and that the future can be read in the pattern of its shell. Madson liberally places the initial T around the compositions in Gothic lettering that is in keeping with the reptile’s formal and magical presence. Humans are also present, but in far off buildings whose remoteness, by contrast, enlarges the turtle to the dimensions of a dinosaur. This is Madson’s key and consistent endeavor – enlarging a life form that would otherwise be marginalized, to great prominence and significance.