Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Matthew Marks Gallery
523 West 24th Street, New York, NY
May 2–June 29, 2024
By EDWARD WAISNIS August 9, 2024
The focus of Terry Winters new body of work skirts the realms of the optical and the celestial. The latter attribute, as well as patterns in nature, three-dimensional modeling and architecture, among other natural and manmade sources, have long been the focus of his attention. The former characteristic, at least as seen here with such force, is something recently developed.
Winter’s methods puts the intensity of the image, rather than playing to the mediative, front and center, allowing two-dimensions to activate direct visual stimulation. This hallmark of abstract painting harks back to mid-20th century invention. The inherent unwieldiness of the compositions, to the point of incredulity, is the point of entry keeping the works from the realm of finicky design. Turning his explorations from flora and cellular structures, found in his past work, to motifs that recall the murmuration of starlings (exploited by computerized drone light shows) as well as the unified movements of schools of fish, in their swells and shrinkages–again, found in the work of Victor Vasarely, but with looser concision.
The seven paintings and five works on paper included in this exhibition were largely created in the last year and, as the press release points out, found inspiration in advanced mathematical principles, musical notation, botany and chemistry. In a statement Winters elucidated: “I’m taking preexisting imagery and respecifing it through the painting process. Information is torqued with the objective of opening a fictive space of lyrical dimension.”.
Winters walked us out of New Image into a detour that incorporated Ensor’s atmosphere with early John Walker’s blasted landscapes. His work digressed briefly, in my opinion, under the seasonal light of the brief resurgence of glazing techniques, best exemplified, in the time, by the paintings of Alexis Rockman. However, Winters, who was never that punctilious to begin with, quickly regained his footing by focusing on simplification of composition against a brash approach to paint handling. Going from strength to strength, from built-up surfaces to ‘oversprayed’ charcoal drawings which worked in league with the days players; from Julian Schnabel to Donald Sultan. In his pictures from the early 80s, one of Winters signature structures resembled a manmade contraption reminiscent of the styrofoam clam-shell container used for take-away meals: Pavement, 1983. By contrast, nature now predominates. All while Winters’ sense of artificiality lingers in off-register complimentary colors.
Rigorously applied raw–in the sense of concentrated direct color with opaque consistency rather than a direct-from-the-tube quality–oil (Layers of oil, was and resin. However, I am opting to treat this amalgam as its base substance.) has produced powdery, nearly velvet, surfaces connoting atmospheres that are not actually there, furthering the optical connection. The conjuring ranges from brushy fields of midnight in Point Cloud (4), 2023 to golden vistas redolent of van Gogh’s sunflower fields, Point Cloud (8) and (11), both 2023. Tunneled and dotted with chromatically contrasting discs in regiments of progressively increasing and diminishing dimensions. Winters’ sullied surfaces hang on the interstices between these flying discs.
Inexplicably, the work’s formulation put me in mind of high-Modernist master filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous quote: “I prefer landscapes to men.”, attributed to by the lack of any discernible allusion to the figurative, in deference to the fields of science and the applied arts.
Winters surfaces are relatives to those in the early paintings of Brice Marden. While the craft employed in the encaustic stillness of Marden’s facture may be referred to as hand-hewn Winter’s finishes would be handmade. This distinction between the burnished and the roughshod contests to Winter’s precise directness in contrast to working to a veneer.
Besides the works already cited, standouts amongst the seven paintings include Point Cloud (1), 2023 (all of the paintings bear the title Point Cloud, with sequential numbers following, in brackets, to denote the particular model) these strategies are put to service as a cerulean-to-teal field for the oogly googly Vasarely-influenced morphing field and form rendered as blue orange encircled bubbles. Then there is the A.I.-assisted–again, the reference to coordinated drone light shows is apropos–zen state that is Point Cloud (2), 2023; an overriding evocation of techno circuitry, mapping, is hard to dispel, only set apart by the baby blanket pinks and blues employed in the rendering.
The works on paper–essentially paintings in the fact they are thickly applied oil on paper works–are executed on what is referred to as double elephant, first used by J.J. Audubon to create large images of birds. In deference to the works on canvas they are more plodding leaning to intimate book illustration striving to the grand.
Then, there is the aspects to this body of work that bespeak of renderings by an adolescent of what they have viewed through a microscope. I do not mean this in a prejudicial sense in any way, shape or form, but simply as being that and recalling that. And, perhaps, there is a youthful eye that Terry Winters summons for guidance Who knows? But, the hints are aplenty.
With hesitation one can only posit what Winters level of study would have produced had he taken up the field of science, rather than his dedication devoted to the calling he has pursued? I emphasize. This thought is approached with hesitation since the realization of such an alternative would result in an intense loss. We benefit having Winters in the upper tier of contemporary painting. WM
Edward Waisnis is an artist and filmmaker. Additionally, he is the Producer of two Quay Brothers films, Through the Weeping Glass and Unmistaken Hands, as well as having overseen the facilitation of their 2012 MoMA retrospective. His writing has appeared in Art New England, COVER, ARTextreme and STROLL.
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