In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Regina Hackett reports that Michael Knutson and Jeffrey Simmons paint the way “sailors scrape barnacles off a deck, chipping away at empty space until it disappears into spiraling patterns. Their work relates to the larger community of abstract artists without being in anyone’s debt. They dig in not to limit themselves but to extend their grasp. Although they have little in common, they share the most important thing, a determination to reinvent the world purged of sloppy sentiment or chilly reserve. Instead of a single perspective, they offer a myriad-minded range of opportunities to see the edge of an experience open into a frontier.” Read more.
In The Stranger, Jen Graves writes that Simmons’s paintings are “groovy and trippy, like op art, but they also, like the work of Gerhard Richter, play with the interdisciplinary blurriness inherent in all looking….These paintings also travel in time, like the stars they reference. Just as it’s possible, because of the great distance, to see stars in the night sky that have actually, in real time, gone dead, so these paintings seem both products of a single, captured moment, and the accumulated results of an extended travel time over the duration of the artist’s process. They record incidents and the residue of incidents; they’re time-lapse paintings.Which is true? What’s truth in a painting, anyway? ” Read more.
“Michael Knutson: Astral and Prismatic Fields,” Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA. Through May 10.
“Jeffrey Simmons: NEBUL�,” Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA. Through May 10.
