Gregg Renfrow: Atmosphere
Toomey Tourell Fine Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with California artist Gregg Renfrow who will be presenting his newest body of work, entitled Atmosphere.
Dates of Exhibition: Friday, May 1st through Saturday, May 30th, 2009.
Reception with the artist: Thursday, May 7th from 5:30-7:30 PM.
Gregg Renfrow’s new works consist of poured accumulations of poylmer and pigment on translucent grounds of cast acrylic. On first viewing, they resemble acrylic on canvas until, upon closer inspection, the light passes through the panel as it hangs slightly forward of the wall. Renfrow applies his multi-layered glazes in striations, juxtaposed with areas of pure pigment that heighten the sense of pure light held in a state of suspended animation. Color and light appear “with the intention of allowing the pigments/hues to be quickened by ambient light”. However, the drips and defined edges of these works never let the viewer forget that they are in fact, looking at a painting. Yet, as in the tradition of minimalism, it is what the viewer brings to the act of looking that intensifies the visual experience. Renfrow’s work seems to want to present a quality of light available only in his paintings – “a summoning of light as the medium of experience”. Or, in the words of art critic Kenneth Baker, this provides “a luminosity cleansed of the reminders of time that tinge our ordinary consciousness of any light source”.
Renfrow’s work enhanced by spiritual quality
Modernism’s abandonment of grand public themes in art for reports of subjective and private life culminated, on one trajectory, with Color Field painting in the 1960s.
Does anyone else see color the same way we do ourselves? We will never know more precisely than color names can indicate.
Critics set a gravestone upon Color Field aesthetics decades ago, for the style’s social irrelevance. But that has not kept Benicia artist Gregg Renfrow from advancing his own path to painting that seems to dematerialize into tints and intensities the moment we surrender to it. Toomey Tourell is showing a selection of his recent work.
Renfrow had to reinvent the pictorial support to achieve the look he wanted, and years ago, he began pouring color over cast sheets of translucent acrylic. On a white wall, light reflected from behind his pictures’ shines through them, enhancing their fine gradations of hue and density.
So much for the parameters; everything else about his work attests to Renfrow’s experience of watching and judging how his materials behave as he varies their interplay endlessly.
Renfrow’s paintings are abstract as you please, yet they quaver with suggestions or reminiscences of imagery.
“Dark Green-Blue-Green” (2009) retains a hint of parted curtains and of radiance from below, as if sheeting up from stage footlights. A less successful trio of smoky gray pieces may remind viewers of a certain age of defective black-and-white TV.
But such associations do not linger where we find Renfrow in his stride. There his paintings attain a kind of levitation and liberation from scale evocative at best of spiritual striving or release.
Gregg Renfrow is represented by a number of galleries nationally, and his work has been included in important corporate and public collections, among them the SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of Art and the Weisman Collection in Los Angeles. This is Gregg Renfrow’s third exhibition with Toomey Tourell.
Gregg Renfrow - Dark Green Over Mauve - 10 x 9 inches
Gregg Renfrow - Iris - Aqua - 10 x 9 inches
Gregg Renfrow - Mars Violet - 10 x 9 inches
Gregg Renfrow - Dark Green - Blue - Green - 51 x 28 inches
Gregg Renfrow - Dark Hues Over True Red & Yellow - 72 x 51 inches
GR09-23 Violet - Red - Violet 10x9
