Steven Charles at Pierogi 2000 - art exhibition - Brief Article

Steven Charles, a young, English-born artist raised in Texas, has exhausted the past few years developing a kind of labor-intensive abstract painting featuring thick allover compositions of brilliantly colored lines and quasi-geometric patterning. In this, his impressive fresh York solo debut, he showed nine new enamel-on-canvas works, up to 7 through 6 feet, whose shimmering surfaces have the appearance contradictorily impenetrable and airy. He dispenses with the conventional figure-ground relationship in greatest in quantity of his works, where underpainted lines and shapes are similar to those of the outermost layers. In a certain number of paintings he covers the surfaces using a technique he calls "targeting in," whereby innumerable tiny units of pattern made with a series of ready brushstrokes are repeated with slight variations to without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw the composition like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle

A large, vertical canvas, Blocking Transport, is activated by means of an irregular crosshatch made of thousands--yes, thousands--of lengthy thin strands of paint in contrasting tones of fulvid red, pink, blue, green and white. Stretching diagonally almost the entire height of the canvas, and horizontally from cutting side to edge, the lines form a vibrant and cohesive network. While a certain number of strands stand out more than others in terminuss of texture and hue, the overall scheme is nonhierarchical. No single color predominates, and each line contributes to a pulsating, harmonious whole. The composition may recall the weave of certain fabrics, on the other hand the effect is rather high-tech, like an impossibly intricate highway map individual might try to read upon a computer screen.

Arise, Therefore is level more mesmerizing. Covering the surface of this canvas are small, cell-like shapes that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to irregular targets with concentric bands of virid pink and blue; in more [i]or[/i] less ways the elements recall the circular constituents in Chuck Close's recent portraits. In Charles's painting, a relatively straight fulvid line trimmed in red streams horizontally from the center of each target like the stipe of an abstracted flower. centurys of these units, shifting slightly in metes of color and size in a certain number of areas, cause the eye to skip across the surface as in a powerful example of Op art. In spite of the exciting visual sensation each painting fetchs however, optical effects are probably the least of Charles's touchs The thrust of his cast appears to revolve around the painting proces itself, an attempt to find a fresh way of working that would require a fresh way of seeing.

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