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For this month's
feature, I am excited to
preview my solo
exhibition* about to open
at The Painting Center, in
Chelsea, NYC.
"Don't Go Meekly into That Good Night", 40 x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm),
Flashe and acrylic on birchwood panel, 2022
To that effect, allow me to share the Press Release that accompanies this
exhibition, in full; it conveys effectively the intent and impact of this
exhibition.
PHILIP GERSTEIN: IN THE INTERVAL
[Epigraph:]
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want. ...
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
~Tao Te Ching (transl. S Mitchell, 1995)
The Painting Center is happy to present a solo exhibition of Philip
Gerstein's Interval Paintings
in our Project Room. This exhibition
highlights selections from his post-minimal series of paintings, following
Gerstein's previous solo show at The Painting Center in 2017, at the start of
this series.
The intervals in painting serve as a potent organizational device, while
their impact can go well beyond a simple principle of compositional
arrangement, to affect our emotive and even vibrational response.
What makes this device have a particularly strong impact in Gerstein's
paintings, is his paired use of intervals and color, to establish the
emotional field of each picture. It is precisely the vitality and ambiguity
that comes from color that allows Gerstein's paintings to be seen as
transcending the dualism of our language and expression -- that restriction
of thinking (& painting) within the binding confines of object/ground,
dark/light, thick/thin, shiny/matte, solid/nebulous, hard/soft,
textured/smooth, clear/unfocused, and ultimately, real/illusory.
Of note is also his paintings' commitment to unrepeatability, where each
painting is allowed to follow its own path, its own inner calling, resulting in
a panoply of surface impressions and outcomes -- like musical
compositions performed with a different combination of instruments each,
with smaller differences progressively magnified as the composition
develops.
Upon longer look, one might even contend that Gerstein pushes his use of
intervals much further, into the realm of metaphor, perhaps even an
illustration of universal principles. Ultimately, it is the pulsing, the barely
perceived vibration of everything around us... the very light that allows us
to see coming in in packets, in pulses between substance & void... it is the
pulse of the universe... . It is what all matter, all material objects around us
are made of, the pulses of more or less congealed, solidified energy. And
within this revealed pulsing, the old object/ground painting conundrum is
being resolved in the clarity of the interval -- in each stroke's surroundings,
in the contradiction of the abstract nature of color interacting with the
concrete nature of object, and the acceptance of this radical ambiguity.
"Flagship", 30 x 40 in. (76 x 102 cm), Acrylic on birchwood panel, 2021
* PHILIP GERSTEIN: IN THE INTERVAL
Jan. 30 - Feb. 24, 2024 OPENING: Thursday February 1st, 5-8 pm
The Painting Center, 547 W. 27 St., Suite 500, New York, NY
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