News
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
Eva Bovenzi at GTU in Berkeley, CA
Opening reminder:
Eva Bovenzi at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.
The opening reception and artist’s lecture will be Thursday March 19 at 6pm in the GTU boardroom at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, Graduate Theological Union, 2400 Ridge Road, Berkeley, California.
For more information, please visit GTU.
