ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Just Say Yes, new paintings by Zachary Buchner in Gallery One.
Chicago, IL, March 24, 2012– ANDREW RAFACZ continues the 2012 season with Just Say Yes, new works by Zachary Buchner. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, May 5, 2012.
Zachary Buchner’s previous series of paintings involved the full translation of his nascent sculptural practice into formidable paintings with expressive, textured surfaces. The final works were as much about sculpture as they were image, the plastered surface thickly poured across the entire canvas, at times containing objects and fragments of previous paintings. This represented a new concentrated approach where the artist, still executing articulated choices about the surfaces and the objects contained by them, was freed up to explore painting space through a rigorous choice of palette and mark making.
By engaging the totality of arguments surrounding the dilemma of painting today, Buchner’s new series of paintings revel in the essential possibilities of materiality, color, and image. Resisting any direct political implications and instead sensitively navigating the complex possibilities available to a contemporary painter, the artist has made paintings where sculptural surfaces threaten to undo their identity as paintings. Colors collide un-ironically and with rapture, and layers of separated processes are stacked to evoke a complex, yet still sublime environment. Stretching beyond his previous impulses to load the frame evenly, his multi-faceted project has become more nuanced. Still retaining a fundamental object relationship to painting, the artist’s hand is imbedded in the process but elegantly detached from the final product.
For Buchner, the notion that paintings should make contact with the world continues to drive the core of his practice. With his continuing interest in the indeterminate but immediate spaces between categories, he engages the history of painting with reverence while generously working within its always current and inherent conflicts.
ZACHARY BUCHNER (Canadian, b. 1979) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 2005. Recent group exhibitions include Let Your Light In at Country Club, Los Angeles; A Person of Color: A Mostly Orange Exhibition, curated by Jose Lerma at Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Under Construction Show at the Poor Farm (The Suburban) Manawa, Wisconsin; and New Icon at LUMA, Chicago. He will be included in the forthcoming Spectral Landscape, curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff, at Gallery 400, Chicago.
Aaron Morse Mata Atlantica
ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Aaron Morse in conjunction with COUNTRY CLUB.
Chicago, IL, March 24, 2012 – Andrew Rafacz continues its ongoing collaboration with Los Angeles-based Country Club with Mata Atlantica, new paintings by Aaron Morse in Gallery Two. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Chicago. It continues through Saturday, March 17, 2012. The exhibition’s title, as well as a recent group of paintings by the artist, is taken from a Portuguese book on the Brazilian rainforest. The resulting "jungle" paintings are imagined from different vantage points. For example, one painting shows the landscape as far beneath us, as if from an airplane, with smoke and fires faintly visible far away. Another picture has us back on the ground in a thick forest setting with a series of vignettes of hidden animals and human interactions that may or may not be geographically or historically accurate. These are painted in a hazy, loose style as if they were something dreamed: Fitzcarraldo meets Rousseau. In a series of new aerial landscapes, Morse experiments with setting and a change in perspective offered by great heights and distance. Distant cities, deserts, watersheds, mountains, and coastlines are created by many layers of atmospheric stains, drips, spills, and frottage techniques. The scale is pleasantly confusing; how high up are we, at what angle do we view the topography below? Though visually these works resemble abstract expressionist paintings, Morse considers them stylized representations of online maps or aerial photography and consistent with his more narrative work. They represent the same pictorial world, just from different points of view.
Mesoamerican artifacts and visuals are mined in two La Salle Codex watercolors. Though Robert de La Salle was a 17th century explorer, here it refers to the street in West Adams, Los Angeles where the artist lives and works. These lost language warrior-charts are reminiscent of hieroglyphics and Marvel comics; their details and meaning enigmatic and now nearly abstract. Morse continues his preoccupation with figures and action in the landscape, and also with the malleability of historical and illustrated imagery. Subtle decisions of scale, composition, color and materials allow for a complex re-imagining of pictorial information from our culture into the painted form, colorful pictures that read fast and slow.
AARON MORSE (American, b. 1974) lives and works in Los Angeles. His works are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
