'Temporal Shifts' Catalog Essay

The following catalog essay was written for the exhibition 'Temporal Shifts' curated by Matthew Neil Gehring at the Flecker Gallery located at Suffolk County Community College featuring work by Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof.   

Painting's Time 

Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof harness painting’s ability to arrest time, in their discrete yet complementary studio practices. The exhibition, Temporal Shifts, coalesces around a similarly resonant painterly language, one that revolves in part, but is not limited to the grid, to fields of color, or to an approach to mark making that is expansive and idiosyncratic. Rather, their language remains in service to a flatly rendered pictorial object.

Anne Russinof, who employs soft, watery grids in her paintings, complements Paul Behnke’s larger open fields of luminescent color. Craig Olson departs formally in his work, but adds linguistic complexity to the exhibition through his use of shaped objects depicting symbols and elements from nature. The works in Temporal Shifts depart from narrow linear progression. They fracture time, enabling paintings’ power to become a repository for memory, actions and the discernments which precede the moment of their completion. While the physical objects—made from perishable linseed oil, linen, stretcher bars and tacks—may suffer neglect, become cracked or degraded by an inadvertent wall-hanging too close to direct light.  But the original impetus for each work of art remains inviolate, petrified in the amber of its own presence and physicality.

The finality of a painting, reaffirmed each time it is viewed, cannot be revoked except by physical destruction. Yet a painting’s temporal finality is counterbalanced by the viewer’s own indeterminate being in time. Whereas a painting stands mute in the world and requires a viewer to activate its visual voice, viewers are consistently active in time and activated by time, silent perhaps, but never mute. Viewer live within their own relentless unfolding in time, projecting their psychology and energy onto works of art.  Properly constructed paintings act as a shield against viewers’ projections, arresting their incessant forward mental motion. A painting halts time. The stronger the painting, the more temporality is suspended, punctured, and elided for the viewer. Instead of onwardness, a painting directs the viewer back into their own self, arresting their awareness of time in the moment of contemplation. Temporal Shifts posits the artwork of these three painters as altering time for the viewer. For a moment look, and allow the paintings to catalyze internal change.  

                                                                             

'Temporal Shifts' Instillation View
Curated by Matthew Neil Gehring
Flecker Gallery Suffolk County Cmmunity College
works by Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof

Temporal Shifts' Instillation View
Curated by Matthew Neil Gehring
Flecker Gallery Suffolk County Cmmunity College
works by Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof

Temporal Shifts' Instillation View
Curated by Matthew Neil Gehring
Flecker Gallery Suffolk County Cmmunity College
works by Craig Olson, Paul Behnke and Anne Russinof  

http://www.fleckergallery.org/