Contact GALLERY@WINSTONWACHTER.COM for an appointment to view the work
Chris Trueman: WWMC5, 2021, Video, Edition of 5, View video here: https://vimeo.com/564300538
Winston Wächter Fine Art is excited to share our West Gallery summer group exhibition, Order and Chaos, featuring works by Iván Carmona, Andrew Casto, Michael Schultheis, Audrey Stone and Chris Trueman. This exhibition celebrates the beauty and elegance of simple line and color, as well as the dynamic energy created through layered gestural marking. With this section of artists, it is clear that the world is more complete with both viewpoints.
“Using a visual language rooted in Modern Art, I began to recognize similar forms in the natural world around me. The mountains and forests of Puerto Rico became sculptural constructions and swaying mobiles in my mind, and I communicate these intimate moments in a manner I hope is accessible to a larger audience. A shape, word, texture, or color can activate potent memories, and this sense of nostalgia is key to a reading of my work. The sculptures are abstracted; they aren’t one-to-one representations. Each emotional memory is passed through the sieve of Modernism, creating connections between my remembrances and recollections of the past and the timeline of art history.
Looking back at a particular moment, I might remember a specific shape, color, or feeling. Through the years, these memories take on a life of their own. They expand and contract, shapes soften and blur, and colors push through to become more vibrant. By working with clay, a product of nature, I am able to make the immaterial physical. The unifying effect of flat, rich color helps to amplify the presence of even the smallest object and serves to highlight its curves, angles, and planes. Each of my works pulls the past forward into a new body for the present to see. By creating these physical manifestations, I can remember, reflect upon, and share my histories with the world.”
“My work involves an investigation into extant negative forces in our lives, and to what degree the phenomenological ramifications of stress shape us physically, mentally, and emotionally. The formal language present in this analysis is based on a material study of geologic processes translated into ceramic and mixed media objects, often referencing historical vessel form. I seek a purposeful link between macrocosmic environmental change, and interruptions in our otherwise routine existence.
The foundation of this exploration is a desire to uncover the sublime in these moments of incongruity; the rush of presence into experience that might otherwise remain banal and ordinary, brought on by perceived inconvenience. My work asserts that it is possible for our daily vexations to illuminate the power of the present moment – something we all too often fail to notice.”
“Observing shifting color and light in nature is an ecstatic experience for me. I find myself simultaneously excited and calm, a dynamic opposition I seek to generate in my work through the interplay of line and subtle gradients of color.
In my current paintings, I use the boundaries between broad and narrow bands of adjacent colors to generate visual vibration. I am intrigued by the way the eye and brain process these transitions, informing the viewer’s emotional and physical responses.
Beyond color and composition, underlying themes tie the paintings together into series: the giving and receiving of information; concepts of infinity and containment; equality; relationship of self to others; and more recently death, loss, and absence. Although these subjects are not meant to be absolute in the work, they play a part in both the conception and the process of making.”
“I make paintings that materially explore the temporality of representation through abstraction by constructing new systems and modes in painting that converge the material of painting with the visual aesthetic of digital and photographic imagery. My exploration of the paint medium also discovers the possibilities of how paint can articulate space, surface, time and image. In my newest work I have developed a process of painting on large scale Yupo, a synthetic paper that is often mounted to Sintra. The unique interaction of the smooth non-absorbent Yupo surface and various types of acrylic paint application both sprayed and directly with brush and squeegee allow for marks and forms to be made as both positive and negative space. This back and forth process of positive and negative reverses the norm of gestural painting by presenting the gestural mark and its inversion within the same space, rather than the physical presence of the mark as a record of movement or idea, the negative gesture exists as the transparent boundary between previous and subsequent layers.”
Chris Trueman: WWMC5, 2021, Video, Edition of 5, View video here: https://vimeo.com/564300538
“This year, I was scared of breathing. I became fearful of inhaling, and guilty when exhaling. My new work is titled Geometry of Breath, and I explore how we can easily visualize and map our breathing, and learn to play with our own breath and the breath of another person.
This bronze Vitruvian Breath is my playful exploration of how to breath freely again, with my breath circling inside the sculpture with each inhale and exhale. I investigate how the symmetry and proportions that Vitruvius applied to architecture, and that da Vinci considered with the exterior human body, also apply to our breathing – as well as our consciousness.”
