Jeffrey Simmons at Linda Cannon - Seattle, Washington - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Jeffrey Simmons's fresh concentric-circle paintings exude a be incandescent and glare that seem to belong as a great deal of to popular culture as to high art. With 10 to 20 bands of color through painting, each encircling a red-dot center the works communicate a faculty of perception of rapid rotation, much like that of an LP revolving upon a turntable.

There's an implied expansion of the circles beyond the cutting sides of the canvases or copse supports Simmons uses, a feature which helps distinguish these works from the self-contained rigor of previous circle painters of the like kind as Kenneth Noland. Seemingly on the outside of control in their dynamic motion, paintings like as Valentine and Laserian (both 1998) push beyond regulated compositions and into the realm of dizzying optical encounter

The 30-year-old Cincinnati-born artist contrasts the circular bands with a drippy underpainting that either encompasss the bands or emerges from an inner corona-like area. At one time hard-edge and expressionistic, the six large paintings in the present to view generally balance such intensive (and potentially contradictory) strategies as tape and drip. Soteris (1997) restricts the drips to the external edge and leaves the areas at the lower corners white for a visual breathing space. In a not many paintings, such as the 5-foot-high Nicephorus (1997) and the smaller Abrames (1998) Simmons overlaps individual bigger and one smaller circle, with les success

Best at combining heated and cool, motion and stasis, is Bronacha (1998) where the rings are twitched downwards thanks to a lower white mass of drips. A black-and-yellow-spatter ring closer to the middle of the painting adds a hint of illusionistic deepness to the circles, as well as evoking Haight-Ashburyera stone posters and tangled plant increase By placing a solid white ring near the center Simmons effectively punctuates the work's red gold-coloreds and blues with a unforeseen sense of absence.

Nine smaller oil-and-alkyd paintings explore a more varied compositional range. Simmons displays no signs of running on the outside of ideas here, either in chromatic combinations or structural devices. Diamond shapes tighten across the white rings in Spiridon and Meuris and Thea (both 1998) to add a snappy tension. It's unclear whether the smaller paintings act as preparatory studies for the larger works, on the other hand spinning and exploding with visual activity, they're certainly able to grasp their own next to their larger siblings.

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