DONALD MOFFETT – ANY FALLOW FIELD
2016-09-26Any fallow field includes Moffett’s latest extruded paintings, contemplating the natural world. With these signature works, the artist coaxes his oil paint into individual tendrils that are perpendicular to the canvas. These paintings are counterbalanced by a new series of resin works, whose glossy and translucent faces hint at their depth. While the structural form remains consistent within both bodies of work, with their milled holes and cutouts resembling buckshot or flora, the surfaces are unambiguously inversed. In their simplest form, the resin works are a study of material, purely viscous—like honey clinging to the comb. At their most complex, Moffett fuses tinted resin atop photographs that he took over the last year—the images abstracted and suspended as a beetle in amber. Born and raised in Texas, Moffett shares an instinctive kinship with the taciturn environs of his childhood, capturing in photographs barren landscapes, wildflowers, roadsides and fields littered with the remainders of human intervention.
The distinctions between abstraction and representation are blurred throughout the artist’s oeuvre with his employment of the canvas as a surrogate for the body, and in these new works, by his obliteration of the image through perforation and obscuration. This penetration of the painting as object has long concerned Moffett in his frustration with and desire to overcome the limits of the “wall,” compelling him not only to pierce the picture plane but also expand its spatial boundaries.
Opposite – Lot 082916 (fallow field and farmhouse), 2016
Exhibition runs through to October 15th, 2016
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
New York
NY 10011
