PHILIP TAAFFE
2013-06-03Taaffe’s work is a unique technical amalgam of freely gestural painting that is often contrasted with carefully mapped and measured surfaces, combined with printings from linocuts, hand-drawn relief plates, silkscreens, and stencils. Traditional techniques, such as paper marbling and gold leaf, are often employed. The artist’s meticulous, labor-intensive methods have often been compared to that of medieval manuscripts, yet their contemporary veracity is always evident in their broad embrace and appropriation of the language of modernism. As art historian Charles Stein notes, “Taaffe’s reinvention of the beautiful represents a kind of valiant inquiry, a conscientious refusal of the suppression of human possibility.”
In this current body of work, Taaffe returns to some of his familiar tropes but employs them in new, previously unseen ways. Sources include natural history illustrations, Roman mosaics, microscopic imaging of Viking artifacts, Syrian embroidery pattern books, masks from Mongolia and the Far East, and devices drawn from calligraphy and book design. Optical vibrancy and visual energy underlie these images, reconnecting abstraction to the natural world and exploring the convergence of the optical and conceptual. “I think the power and possibilities for painting today has to do with binding it to a cultural legacy,” says Taaffe. “Painting is where these symbolic languages or forms somehow crystallize and reveal their ancestry and that in turn shows a certain sense of future possibility.”
Opposite – Thorn Heads, 2013
Exhibition runs through to June 23rd, 2013
Luhring Augustine Gallery
531 West 24th Street
New York
NY
10011
