News
Jimi Gleason @ Toomey Tourell
David M. Roth from Square Cylinder
September 1, 2011
Jimi Gleason - Diffuser, 2011, silver deposit, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 inches
Jimi Gleason - Untitled 12 x 9, 2011, silver deposit, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9 inches
Bring sunglasses if you plan on visiting Jimi Gleason’s Silver Deposit Paintings. It’s the closest thing to bling you’re likely to see identified as painting. Coming from an artist of lesser stature I’d probably squint and move on. But from Gleason, a post-minimalist, light-space influenced innovator, these “paintings” merit a long hard look. There is nothing facile about them.
Gleason pours molten silver across acrylic-coated canvas, and then, somehow, without immolating his canvases, he etches the metal with acid, creating formations that recall geologic and human activity. Flooding, fossilization, lava flows, urban grids and mechanized imprints come immediately to mind. While some of these features are obvious, others, because of the extreme reflectivity, are not. The pictures behave like anamorphic objects; meaning, you must move around them a bit to catch the nuances. Each step reveals new information – information that just as quickly becomes obscured by the glare of ricocheting light.
Overall, these primordial looking paintings feel a bit like what Alberto Burri might have come up with had he been a metallurgist. The link, in particular to Burri’s Combustione series, comes through strongest in the places where Gleason pours acid on congealed metal to reveal the underlying pigment. It appears, alternately, as blackened craters and, in other places, as black and sometimes gilded lines that accentuate the weave of the fabric itself. (Other obvious touchstones for these works are Robert Rauschenberg’s gold paintings from the early and mid 1950s.) Other artifacts of Gleason’s process include tufts of metal that protrude off the surface and sometimes dangle provocatively from the edges. The most prominent features are imprints of tank-tread and scallop-shaped starburst forms on molten metal. Multiplied layer upon layer, they pile up in messy agglomerations, creating the sense of an otherworldly landscape — of oily lakes, silvery mountains and deep fault lines seen from a high altitude.
Gleason is certainly no stranger to excess. Earlier this year, in a show at Samuel Freeman Gallery in Santa Monica, the artist showed candy-colored works where the pigment appeared to have been teased to a high froth. Here, Gleason continues the practice, substituting molten metal for paint to probe the outer reaches of biomorphicism and chance.
While several of the paintings in this show seem underworked and too similar to one another, overall, the majority of the 14 works stand out as unique, self-contained universes. H (1142), the largest at 44 × 39 inches, is a triptych comprised of swirling, colliding currents of solidified silver. Its graceful lines, in contrast to everything else in the show, appear to have coalesced as a received whole, as if the molten metal was swabbed by a pirouetting dancer. It feels like a transitional link, from the color-field paintings he did during the past decade.
Other works in the show, Apex and Diamond DeLap, look backward to the modernist practice of grid-structured composition. Only here, it’s the scorched and metal-stained weave of the canvas itself that defines the grid. The feeling is decidedly post-apocalyptic, and the setting is definitely urban, and the specific locale, if there is one, seems to be the LA basin, rendered as a charred flat expanse punctuated by jagged topography, the remains of a firestorm.
Elegant and tacky, superficial and superficially deep, Silver Deposit Paintings attracts and repels with equal force. Gleason’s technique dazzles if for no other reason than its derring-do which, by itself, warrants a salute. Abstract painting too often seems hemmed in by its past. Gleason, while tethered to that past, always strives to transcend it, and in this outing he nearly succeeds.
–DAVID M. ROTH
Jimi Gleason, “Silver Deposit Paintings” @ Toomey Tourell Fine Art through September 30, 2011.
About the Author: David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.
Renfrow's work enhanced by spiritual quality
Kenneth Baker, Saturday, May 16, 2009
Gregg Renfrow - Dark Green - Blue - Green - 51 x 28 inches
GR09-19 Ivory Black Over Warm Hues 51x28 51x28
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: Atmosphere: Paintings. Through May 30. Toomey Tourell Fine Art, 49 Geary St., San Francisco. (415) 989-6444
