Wendy White: FRENCH CUTS
@ Andrew Rafacz Gallery
835 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, September 10th, from 4PM - 7PM
On view through Saturday, October 23rd
Continuing to employ multiple canvases and heavy saturations of sprayed paint while investigating the limits of space and text, Wendy White‘s newest paintings find the artist adding word-shaped canvases to the periphery of the central canvases and creating a more composed font to deliver the interior text. She has continued her use of black and Day-Glo spray paint as well as large patches of nearly raw canvas. Also present is the contrast between clean, masked out painterly lines and improvised blasts and tangles from a spray gun. The individual words and texts contained in and on the edges of the painting are simultaneously quotidian and strange, extracted from personal memories and signs in the artist’s own experienced, external world. Working like a concrete language poet, White often breaks these words down to the taxeme and then reconfigures them. What we are left with is sometimes a truncation of the original word or phrase, and other times entirely neologistic.
In a fundamental reversal, the content of White’s paintings (namely these semi-mysterious imbedded messages) is largely an extension of the formal relationships of paint and canvas. The declarations and utterances seem to be born out of the liminal space of the painting itself. In this way, literal space and psychological space mesh, redefining the limitations of abstraction as a whole.
The title of the exhibition itself references a fascination with style (haircuts, pop tracks?) but also more directly, a relationship to another language (from which much of the text is derived) and its subsequent dissection. We will present large-scale paintings in Gallery One and new smaller works, exhibited as a series for the first time, in Gallery Two.
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