David Gaither “AXIOM”

511 Gallery

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511 Gallery presents AXIOM, the first New York solo exhibition of paintings by David Gaither, an emerging, self-taught, artist from Mableton, Georgia. Gaither’s paintings are full to the bursting point of multicolored, non-objective shapes that form an optical tapestry. Figurative forms occasionally occupy these half-reality, half-fantasy worlds of Gaither’s own meticulous creation. A wide range of iconographic allusions, both nonspecific and recognizable, are depicted in vibrant colors. Gaither’s canvases vibrate with the energy of saturated colors and geometric, yet varying and original, forms. These large-scale, immersive triptychs and tondos are expansive and elaborate, and they challenge the distinction between ordinary, mundane space and the space of the abstract work. As Harry Cornelius has written in his essay, Frank Stella and the Landscape of Abstraction:
“For abstraction to come into its own, for its space to be real, it must pull the viewer out of his or her own space onto its ground, erasing the traditional DMZ between the viewer and the picture plane on the one hand and the picture plane and the wall on the other.”
David Gaither’s work devises its own dynamic dimension, inviting the viewer to join in its exploration of symbolism, iconography, repetition, and optics. The artist’s formal and symbolic experimentation has resulted in a body of work that would be impossible to imagine in any moment other than the contemporary. The digital and graphic qualities of these paintings, which recollect advertising logos, explode the lines between flatness and three-dimensionality, abstraction and representation, subjectivity and objectivity, reality and fantasy, the seen and the imagined. As citizens of an increasingly digitized and branded world, we are subject to incessant visual overload. This constant, yet often subliminal, osmosis of imagery is made tangible in Gaither’s portal-like canvases. In a juxtaposition of the seemingly infinite, all- over pattern within the conventional, rectangular picture plane, the work simultaneously restricts and expands. Gaither’s work challenges space and time as we know them.