Curated by Hudson
I like a lot, and in this exhibition that may be understood in at least two ways.
Remember in the mid '80s when painting died—amusing, right? For me the significance was more about the focus moving to theory, photography, and information and the resulting effects of how we moved toward a more public understanding or perception of art. After about ten or so years of that, the perception and appreciation of art was more a mental assessment of a thing than an experience of a thing, and while that mode of understanding has continued for another twelve years or so, the shortcomings of operating long term from that sensibility have long remained quite obvious.
Feature Inc. has always offered a strong presence for painting and over the years. I've increasingly realized that the impact of the art on the body is just as forceful if not more so, than its impact on the brain. Letting feelings and mutable physical and emotional sensations guide an understanding of something doesn't necessarily provide for an articulate line of reasoning, but it does offer an interior richness which is personally very satisfying. I especially like how that form of experience leads one to think and talk around something rather than to think or talk something through. Around is more inclusive and open to development than the conclusiveness of through.
—Hudson, Feature Inc.
I overheard two artists in the gallery chatting about the deluge of abstraction that's been around and one quipped to the other that abstraction flourishes in conservative times.
Hard edge abstraction seemed the one to take a look at as it's probably the most ubiquitous and the one that tends to get the most formal. I tend not to be so into formal and prefer when the formal is infiltrated by the personal. That is when abstraction sings to me. How the artist leaks the personal into the formal is the magic of what artists are. My simplest explanation of that process is the word "intentionality."
When I interviewed Andrew Masullo about his work for his November 2010 exhibition at Feature, he let me know that he didn't consider his paintings to be abstract - abstracted from something - but rather he referred to them as nonobjective. It is an interesting distinction to consider.
The seven artists in this exhibition are some of my favorite hard-edgers and all have formal concerns that have been usurped by their person. The eccentricities of their expressions hint that the coup may be achieved in endless ways. Ann Pibal is represented Meulensteen, New York; Todd Chilton, Chicago and Douglas Melini, New York, are not represented by galleries; Nancy Shaver, Cary Smith, Richard Rezac and Andrew Masullo are Feature artists.
—Hudson, Feature Inc.
Todd Chilton and Mike Peter Smith
Mark Rothko reminds us, "The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental."
Todd Chilton paints utilizing a vocabulary that is often understood through its connections to pure form and universal principals. But Todd's approach is anything but pure. He carries a pragmatic realism into his patterns by celebrating imperfection, awkwardness, and sometimes dissonance. Todd avoids old school narrative about something in favor of being something. His results are neither the high-minded attempts to become transcendent, nor the familiar snarky, ironic dismissal of the same we so often see in post minimalism. He manages to embody an earnest exploration of paint as itself, the here and now, while still challenging the bloated self-proclaimed absolutes of the past.
In short, Todd is planted squarely on the flawed material plane we all live on.
Mike Peter Smith navigates a parallel route. He conjures bombastic characters who are wildly attached to romantic arching searches for the TRUTH. But Mike's conclusions are not so much those arching truths. Rather, he illuminates the drive toward absolute truth as a weakness. Mike's musing on life and death is a decorous indulgence. Upon first glance, Mike's character John reads as a lone genius, but he ends up feeling more like a self-absorbed slob. Mike's real romance lies in the street vendor generating a viable way of living the dream. Paradise reveals itself as a childish fantasy, and we are left feeling vulnerable for being taken in. Sympathy rests with familiar human frailties, the idiosyncrasies of a particular vantage point. Focus on the impulse to seek is the perfect foil for the romance of it all. If there is enlightenment, it comes with accepting things as they are, and feeling at home as our awkward flawed particular selves
—Paul Hopkin
Interview on neotericart.com