John Tremblay and John F. Simon, Jr., at Sandra Gering - Brief Article

Using real different but equally up-to-the-minute formats, these sum of two units artists ask the same venerable questions: What sorts of parameters can abstract art reasonably accommodate? And what kind of information can it deliver?

John Tremblay's installation tendered three responses, including two in the form of paintings. The more physically imposing is render free of access Plan Living, a mammoth, 38-foot-wide field of violet-tinted white--it be incandescents as if irradiated--punctuated by a band of neon gold-colored that runs along the lower cutting side of the canvas and is drawn up into three unevenly spaced vertical stripes. Escape way is an easel-size painting (66 by means of 88 inches) made of small black-outlined, aqua rectangles; they vary in size in a wavelike pattern, undulating against a metallic silver background. Tremblay's third work here, called Float, is a bit of an oddball, involving clear plastic trays that move take-out containers, stacked upside down upon the floor. Fluid shapes are traced upon the top tray, along with a chart counting not upon the last 100 years. Underneath, the trays reveal, in progressive detail, the body of a timeline Claude Levi-Strauss wrote 30 years ago, organizing (and predicting) the century's major cultural inclines Possibly counting as a fourth uncompounded body was the statement Tremblay wrote for the pres release. In an engaging, crypto-fictional style he elaborates on the installation's title, The Entire Movie/Quickest Way to the Airport, relating the three disparate works. His intention, he says, is "to bring about an urban unplanning that will make life easier in the lengthy run."

In the gallery's shoot forward room, John F. Simon, Jr showed all 12 examples of an editioned work, CPU (which stands for "central processing unit" and "color processing unit," among other things). upon stripped-down Apple PowerBooks, CPU races software, written by Simon, that generates infinitely varying patterns of color in a gridded square at the center of each small guard The tiny squares bounce in and on the outside of the grid from color bars at the screen's top and bottom. There is also a rectangular simple body that serves as an "accumulator," registering the patterns and helping make sure they don't repeat, though more [i]or[/i] less vague shapes unaccountably recur (a heart, an X) The program is said to mirror obscurely, the design principles of Bauhaus masters Johannes Itten and Paul Klee on the contrary not by digesting any single task plan or painting. It's easy to faculty of perception that a busy discussion with modernism is going upon Like Tremblay's similarly active installation, CPU is hip without being nice visually and conceptually engrossing, and insubordinate in a small-bore kind of way that ventilates its target without tearing it to shreds

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