(in)Finities reviewed in Ulster Pub. Almanac

Paul Smart wrote a nice review of the show this week. One small correction: the gallery website is kmoca.org (with one a.)

A mushrooming oeuvre
Works of Peter Barrett on view at KMOCA through Thanksgiving













Peter Barrett's Mycelium, 2008, oil on MDF, latex on wall, 12 x 14 feet.
[ Deborah Degraffenreid ]

by Paul Smart

Peter Barrett's work, seen through Thanksgiving at the Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art (KMOCA) in the Rondout, is deceptive at first. It looks decorative, feels easy. Then the amount of work involved in his full wall piece, Mycelium, gradually becomes apparent and the perfection of his wall shapes come to focus. The drawings in the gallery's back room start to speak out.

This is Barrett's inaugural exhibition in the Hudson Valley since moving to Woodstock from Brooklyn two years ago, the better for him and his wife to raise their son and pursue their careers as artist and dancer. But I suspect that it'll open up the gates for a deluge of more work over the years to come - especially given the beauty of the installation works, a new series of outdoor pieces he started last summer in New Jersey and Rhode Island and a growing quantity of commissions that have pumped him up for bigger environment works of the sort hinted at by Mycelium.

The works are mazelike in some instances, amoebic in others. Most are oil paint on carved MDF: the compressed sawdust substance used in Ikea furniture.

Yes, Barrett says, he did doodle a lot as a kid - in class, on the phone and eventually on graph paper - as well as at the Rhode Island School of Design for his undergraduate work and the Art Institute of Chicago for his MFA. His parents supported him from the start. He sees his work progressing in a single line from his beginnings.

Barrett calls his artwork a "practice," much as either a lawyer or yogi uses the term. "You devote yourself to it, but the work itself sort of comes out of the act of creating it," he explains. "Creativity is preparing yourself to be the most effective conduit you can be for the work to flow through."

Showing off examples from a 70-foot wall created in Salem, New York this past summer, or the flower labyrinth that he made for a new outdoor sculpture park in Rhode Island, he speaks about how pleased he is to have honed what he does to a point where he welcomes visualizing ever-more-complex works. He also acknowledges how proud he is of having learned to "concentrate visual energy" as strongly in large pieces as small. "Give me the space and I will fill it," he says.

Barrett's work comes to KMOCA - a great space in its own right - with an impressive r￩sum￩ of previous one-man and group shows in Boston and New York, Canada and Europe. His work has been a regular at the art world's big selling fairs of recent years.

He's looking forward to expanding the number of applications for his practice in his new home region, but also noticing how much he's enjoying the give-and-take of the region's art scene. "I love other people's eccentricities," he says, "especially when presented with a rigorous work ethic and meticulous standards."

The Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art (KMOCA) is located at 103 Abeel Street near the Armadillo restaurant. "(In)Finities," Barrett's first show in the Hudson Valley, will be up there through Thanksgiving weekend. For further information visit www.kmocaa.org or the artist's own website at www.barrettart.com.

"Williamsburg Window" at Rupert Ravens Contemporary

I have three pieces in the "Williamsburg Window" show- curated by Todd Rosenbaum of the Hogar Collection in Brooklyn- at Rupert Ravens Contemporary in Newark, NJ. The show is up until January 18, 2009.

(in)Finities opens at KMOCA

(In)Finities, a solo show of recent work, opens at KMOCA in Kingston, NY on November 1. The show includes the latest iteration of the "Mycelium" wall pieces, plus reliefs and new works on paper. For more information, contact the gallery.

Salem Art Works

I did a two-part residency at Salem Art Works in Salem, NY this summer. The first part was broken into short visits every couple of weeks as I tilled, planted, and then tended an 82-foot diameter labyrinth of sunflowers and morning glories. The second part was an intense week of work on their 77-foot gallery wall. Both are on view through the 2008 season, which ends on October 1.

To see progress shots of the labyrinth, click here. For more information about their location and visiting hours see their website, or call.

Salem Art Works
19 Cary Lane
Salem, New York 12865

Tel: (518) 854 -7674
Email: info@salemartworks.com

All Points West

I was fortunate and grateful to be invited to build a commissioned piece at the All Points West music and arts festival in Liberty State Park, NJ. The piece- "Spire"- was a 17 foot high octagonal pyramid, painted and then covered with the spheres I have used in previous installations. It was up on the hill in the VIP area, and was well received. I hope to be able to do future installations at this and other festivals.

Obsessive Reductive

Obsessive Reductive, my first curatorial effort, opens at the Hogar Collection in Williamsburg on June 13 from 6-9:30 PM. It's a group show with work by six abstract artists, including a piece of mine. We published a catalog for the show, which will be available at the gallery. The show announcement is below; for more information contact the gallery at 718 388 5022 or visit their website.














“OBSESSIVE REDUCTIVE”

Catalog essay by Peter Barrett

Michael McCaffrey’s seeming monochromes are in fact compositions of circles, bands, crosses, and targets- archetypal divisions of the square- made of two extremely similar yet slightly complementary colors. The close colors, applied with foam rollers for a blended edge, makes for a subtle but intense vibration that never quite resolves; they insist upon their instability with a quiet force, to the point where one has the feeling that they continue to pulse even in the absence of observing eyes.

Heather Hutchison also divides the square, but in her work the physical depth of the pieces and nature of the materials makes light both the subject and literal object. Appearing by turns natural, like sky over water, then synthetic, like a road or a wall, they become stand-ins for our experience of the sublime: glowing, yet confined within a box; gorgeous, but partially obscured. Her meticulous use of materials, and the balance between the hard-edged (plywood, plexi) and the liquid (wax, paint) allow her to wring a startling variety of experiences from a few elements.

Miki Lee uses a deceptively simple device: non-repeating colors defined by undulating contours. The varied results show just how much energy can spring from adjusting a few parameters: whether they ignore or are bound by the edge of the canvas, to what degree each color is influenced by its neighbors- whether in color, or contour, or both- and where the palette is keyed for each painting all have dramatic impact on the outcome. The result is a dynamic equilibrium- a tension between busy and tranquil- that creates perpetual motion.

Peter Fox has a very different take on the possibility for complexity to emerge from a narrow set of rules. Letting gravity pull his paint toward the floor, he intervenes as it drips, creating fascinating intricacies where hand, accident, and physics all contribute. The resulting layers of color upon color read as a kind of super-dense language, so the paintings seem constructed not just out of paint, but of paint deliberately formed into something more than itself- paint imbued with intelligence, that can form, be, and explain a painting all at once. All of this seething syntactical energy takes place within the boundaries of traditional canvas squares and rectangles, at once emphasizing and superseding the medium.

Cecilia Biagini’s shim pieces use off-the-shelf materials to create playfully elegant forms that transcend their humble origins. She uses the subtle variations in length from shim to shim and a careful awareness of the ways in which the wedges can compound into curves- and also cancel them out- to generate richly varied undulations. The bright, saturated colors she uses seem random up close, but from farther away they create a sense of light across the whole piece, acting as an almost chiaroscuro modeling that gives an added sense of volume and drama to each work.

Peter Barrett works principally in painted reliefs- paintings that edge into the third dimension without becoming fully sculptural. Painted in gradated bands, they simultaneously evoke both extremes of several visual vocabularies: analog/digital, organic/geometric, natural/synthetic, and scientific/psychedelic. By varying the form and color, and moving between symmetry and asymmetry, he creates hybrid forms that push painting into the third dimension without giving up its essential nature; the object and its surface fuse together and become inseparable.

The six diverse artists in this show are all exploring rich post-minimalist pictorial terrain, achieving rich results within narrow constraints. While at first glance all their work appears to share the same cool, detached quality that characterizes much reductive work, upon closer examination all these pieces are clearly made by hand. The resulting imperfections and vicissitudes, rather than hindering the results, are in fact essential to the effect; the handmade surfaces give the works a warmth and depth that belies their formal rigor. By means of such deliberate engagement with the defining tension of painting- between illusion and material- all of the works in this show elegantly subvert initial impressions and thus affirm the continuing relevance of handmade images in the digital age.

"...66 pieces..." at Haim Chanin

"Bolt" will be in a group show entitled "...66 pieces of art on the wall..." at Haim Chanin Fine Art in New York. The show opens Friday, May 9, and there will be a reception on June 11. The gallery is located at 121 W. 19th st, 10th floor. For more information, contact the gallery at 646 230 7200 or visit their website.

... 66 pieces of art on the wall...
May 9 - July 12, 2008

Opening
Friday, May 9, 2008 6-8 PM

Reception for the artists
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 6-8 PM

Haim Chanin Fine Arts is pleased to announce … 66 pieces of art on the wall…, a selection of works by artists regularly shown, championed and collected by Haim Chanin Fine Arts, on view from May 9 through July 12, 2008. The opening will take place on Friday, May 9, 2008, from 6 to 8 PM and there will be a reception for the artists on June 11, 2008, 6-8 PM. The exhibition will feature approximately 70 works – sculptures, works on paper, paintings, by 34 contemporary artists:

Frederic Amat, Jose-Maria Armenter, Peter Barrett, Mary Bennett, Anna Bialobroda, Pierrette Bloch, Robert Bowen, Gulsen Calik, Jonathan Callan, Joaquim Chancho, Vicky Colombet, Christine Crozat, Edith Derdyk, Evru, Jean-Michel Fauquet, Catherine Gfeller, Angel Haro, Virginia Katz, Seth Kaufman, John Kelly, Dominique Labauvie, Jeannette Leroy, Matta, Paul Moran, Jorge Oteiza, Heribert C. Otterbach, Jaume Plensa, Raquel Rabinovich, Ofelia Rodriguez, Dominica Sanchez, Eduardo Santiere, Pierre Soulages, Harvey Tulcensky, Lucia Warck Meister

By choosing from favorite works and approaching the installation in an improvisational, associative salon-style hanging, Haim Chanin Fine Arts attempts with this exhibition to offer the viewer an intimate and subjective look at artworks, far from the neutrality “de rigueur” in galleries or museums. The exhibition weaves stories between the artworks while creating unexpected interpretations and dialogues the way a collector would in his/her home. In this sense, the exhibition is a celebration of the art collection as an expression of an individual’s taste, personality and vision, rather than a financial venture, a social status or a trendy commodity.

Haim Chanin Fine Arts continues in its commitment to bring established and renowned artists from Europe and Latin America to New York. Following this exhibition, the gallery will present an exhibition of works by American artist Paul Moran (Fall 08). Haim Chanin Fine Arts is located in the heart of the city, between the Flat Iron District, West Chelsea and Union Square, at 121 W 19St, between 6th and 7th Avenues.

For further information on this exhibition, please contact Mathilde Simian at (646) 230-7200 or msimian@haimchanin.com.