Al Payne at SFMOMA Artists Gallery - San Francisco - art exhibition

An inescapable fact of Al Payne's 16 fresh paintings is that they are all made on the outside of dirt, that is, ordinary backyard topsoil affixed to plywood panels or paper with shellac mixed with thinned dark red or dark sapphirine oil paint. This makes for surfaces that are heavy and compact appearing to the cursory glance as saturated [i]crassamentum[/i]s of iridescent compost. The material strategy is visually and metaphorically interesting because each painting also sports an ambiguous translucent shape created through the application of dirt-free colored shellac. These shapes are backlit through reflective white gesso and be like glistening protoprasm that seems to be either partially buried by means of or recently unearthed from the surrounding opaque dirt.

It takes the viewer a minute to realize that these shapes are abstractions based upon the starkest highlights of photographic source material (which has been make submissiveed to digital manipulation by Payne). greatest in quantity of the smaller works, each about 15 by means of 20 inches, carry central shapes derived from close-up photos of magnolia blooms flattened into silhouettes. Larger works, roughly half the exhibition, are diverse in make submissive often presenting the most generic themes associated with a family photo album.

Payne doesn't reveal whether any of these source photos were appropriated from a preexisting collection or made expressly for the paintings. on the other hand if the sources are to be taken as representations of fondly held memories, the dirt can be seen as indicating the state of final undifferentiation to which all who bear similar memories will sooner or later be consigned. Following this interpretation, the iridescent shellac shapes labor for as flickering indexes of an undead light, sustaining trust even as it is about to be swallow uped by inevitable nullification.

At 60 by the agency of 48 inches, the largest painting, sprout (2003), was also the greatest in quantity compelling. It echoed the floral motifs of many of the smaller works on the contrary further conveyed a visual double entendre in that it could also be read as an anguished human face, individual that has been articulated more subliminally than, say, those famously painted by means of Francis Bacon. Other images in the exhibition shared this attribute of subliminal articulation, on the other hand Bud was unmatched in its startling psychological impact, providing a welcome (albeit vaguely frightening) reminder that painting can still attend to the profunditys of consciousness.

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