In Bomb, Raphael Rubinstein wrote about Christopher Deeton‘s big, fluid, black abstractions on view at MAKEBISH through the end of the month. The paintings evoke Morris Louis’s Color Field paintings, but Rubinstein, long an admirer of Deeton’s work, says there’s more to it than that. Here’s an excerpt:
Maybe Orozco�s depiction of the fire-stealing god also planted seeds for the bilateral symmetry that dominates Deeton�s recent work. Eliciting beautiful tonal nuances from black paint alone, Deeton uses symmetry not to riff on the legacy of Morris Louis, but to devise a new iconography and a new technique�despite appearances, his arcing bands are not poured � la Louis but laid down with a paintbrush. Evoking the mirroring structures that pervade the natural world as well as suggesting the more remote symmetries of particle physics, Deeton�s paintings unfold like butterfly wings and loom up like Gothic gates, at once pulling the viewer in ever deeper and marking the magical frontier between two realms. The latest in a long line of artist-alchemists, he sees his paintings as the result of �discovery� rather than �invention�; they are, he says, �the physical manifestation of something that exists elsewhere.
“Christopher Deeton: Numbers,” MAKEBISH, West Village, New York, NY. Through October 2014.
Related posts:
Morris Louis investigation
Catalogue essay: COVER THE EARTH by Stephen Maine
——
Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. For permission to use content beyond the scope of this license, permission is required.
