James Little “Color/Barriers”
June Kelly Gallery
This event has ended.
An exhibition of recent paintings by James Little – large, horizontal canvases that reflect his steadfast focus on structure, shapes and color opens at the June Kelly Gallery.
Little is a meticulous craftsman who creates his own colors with pure pigment and heated beeswax and layers each hue multiple times in parallel bands on the canvas. This technique gives his paintings a formal intelligence, a depth of color and an exciting energy that is all their own.
In these new paintings, color and structure are critical fixations that in Little’s work complement his geometric pictorial style. The edges of his vertical bands are saturated with lucid color as they give way to other patterns – chevrons, rectangles and zigzag designs of varying widths.
These changes establish yet a new harmonization between structure, form and color, breaking Little’s sense of groupings of bars repeatedly aligned on a flat continuum. A logic of expectedness is met head-on by recreating chromatic and structural shifts that reflect Little’s macro intention, talent, obsessiveness with geometric form and verve.
Museum director Jim Harithas, who has followed Little’s work for many years, comments that, “each work has multiple, implicit and potential meanings and sensations that are revealed by the act of simply looking at the paintings.”
Little’s paintings, Harithas says, should be seen as “bearers of profound feelings or as symbolic personages or archetypes of the viewer’s imagination, such as gods, warriors, demons, and goddesses…. They are an integral part of the texture, color and design of the paintings, a beauty that subtly unlocks its secrets through the contemplative and emotive powers invested by the viewer into each work. The result is a fierce geometry of being, born of the artist’s passion for art and justice.”
Media
Schedule
from May 14, 2015 to June 23, 2015