Galleri Urbane announces a new exhibit
"Refracting all but one" by
Marfa artist Jason Willaford.
"Refracting all but one" is a systemic
group of paintings exploring the
evolution of the line and how we see things.
The fact that I can drop a wet
piece of string on the floor and watch it
transform into a beautiful line
mimicking that of a horizon leads me to
believe there is an ultimate connection
between everything,
says Willaford.
Willaford's use of string is a
humorous ode to a string theory of
aesthetics in which the visible world is
connected by fibers so small that they
are not perceptible to neither human nor
mechanical devices. Here, seeing is
about what's not visible as much as it is
about color and light. The series is a
continuum of exact specs (32x2x96). Each
piece is white with wheat pigment
lines that convey energy.
The medium used is "Encaustic on canvas
stretched over birch plywood,
this rigid surface allows the artist to work
back into the piece with a subtractive
process. The surfaces are luminous and
transparent showing the layers of
medium that seem to
have a buttery tactileness.
To further explain his intent Willaford
quotes a line from Herman Melville's
Moby Dick. Whiteness is not so much about
color as the visible absence
of color, and at the same time the concrete
of all colors. Melville's theory; that
white is truth, when everything else is
stripped away in nature we are left with white.
Willaford was born in 1969 in Tampa, Florida.
He received his BFA
from Florida State in 1992. He is in over 300
private and public collections in the U.S.