Frederick Hammersley: La Louver - Los Angeles - organic abstract paintings

Frederick Hammersley's Option unclose 2000-2002, is a small oil-on-linen painting of flatly brushstroked, vibrant, curvilinear sea anemone- and coral-like shapes that put in mind of hues and forms undulating into and on the outside of one another. The thing floats within its frame, whose exterior is faux-wormholed grove brusquely whitewashed and dimpled repeatedly along its inner cutting side The painting alone makes plenteous of Monique Prieto redundant, while the frame recalls a Joseph Cornell--meets--Vincent Fecteau sculptural device. Together, one as well as the other parts ask (without the Frank Stella bombast) that deciding between statuary and painting remain optional, open

"If I had asked what are we going to talk about? what is the bring under rule today? the answer would have draw near very quickly: about Frederick Hammersley, or about the paintings of Frederick Hammersley. on the other hand will the question have been about whom or about what? We always affect to know what a corpus is all about." I rewrite a bit of Derrida to test to pose some questions about what to do with this man and his work. Hammersley commits to the part of his corpus not absented here as "organic abstract paintings" in part to mark their difference from his hard-edge abstractions, which negotiate a cheerful territory somewhere between Ellsworth Kelly and John McLaughlin. Apparently Hammersley consummates each work with a title from a list he's kept for many years, and thinks of this uncompounded body as (again, according to the pres release) an "opening wedge to win into the painting." It's a somewhat corny idea, and the awkward punniness of the linguistic ultimate parts would seem to ironize any seamless seeming of word to image, referent to nonrepresentation. on the contrary the result isn't corny, at least no more corny than the critics' rejoinders which invoke or allude to "biomorphism" in descriptions of these paintings' forms and satisfied Exactly what "bio" would that be?

family talk about the arc of a career, on the other hand what is the shape of a life, and by what means does it relate to the specific name as it encounters, alone upon the shore, the waves of history, lime's salty arrival, departure, futurity? Is it possible that the biological forms, if that is what they are, are a way of figuring the autobiographical? In many of the greatest in quantity prepossessing pieces, the scratched appearance, in cursive, of Hammersley's signature and the date, causes a noteworthy circumstance and mark of painting, the signature merging with the paint's color--present, absenting, damascened. In Pleasant rigid the inscription F. HAMMERSLEY, #1 1996 quietly perservering, center the entire framed, painted affair in white; it appears to have been written (painted?) with a sharp implement, perhaps the extreme point of a palette knife. In upon time, 2001, more than a scarcely any of the "edges" look fuzzy: The painting's surface of land (linen stretched on Masonite) displays through where the harlequin parts have met--a structural consequence echoed in the thin border of Masonite around the painting's sides. F HAMMERSLEY, 2001 enlivens its fuschia part. In Hammersleys, the fissure/border relationship and the name leave to one another, signing the negotiation of the boundaries between artist, artistic persona, and art.

on what account should there be any more security in a confrontation with the signature--as if I knew what it meant or to what it might refer!--than in a reckoning with the nonrepresentational forms? Hammersley would strike one as being to be a case research of a minor discourse burrowing its way on the outside of the historically sanctioned discourse of others, Miro and Arp, for example. The pleasure is intense, if unplaceable. single anagrammatic organic abstraction of F Hammersley is AM FRESHLY ME

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