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Past and Future:
Artist Reception: August 3 (First Friday Art Walk) 5 - 8 PM
Artist Gallery Talk on Saturday, August 4 at 2PM
Imperfect Geometry features 15 new panels by Santa Fe painter Michael Kessler. Working in acrylic, the artist builds up layer upon layer of paint and glaze compounds to create deep and visually complex surfaces. Kessler's paintings present themselves as well-ordered geometric compositions, but with every moment past the initial glance, the viewer finds the clarity of the work is the not the result of simplicity, but rather aesthetic coherence. Kessler’s paintings are heavily worked and he is a master of texture. His surfaces are rich and tense with appeal. Viewers are often struck by the seemingly endless means by which Kessler applies paint to his panels—and by the way his painterly gestures each seem to take up the entire surface, as though every layer could be seen as a single gesture. The result is that his paintings are unusually coherent while maintaining a graceful complexity.
The title, Imperfect Geometry, refers to Kessler's apparent geometrical logic. While his works might first seem symmetrical or mathematically organized, further viewing reveals they are not. Kessler's virtuoso sensibilities are at their best in this subtle space. It is a moment of triumph when the viewer comes to see the painting’s integration is not the result of pre-planned geometry, but the artist’s sensibilities manifest through the process of painting: improvisation, call and response, transition, color balance, contrast and so on. The longer the viewer considers one of Kessler's paintings, the more their logic moves in the direction of the organic and away from the mathematical.
This is not to deny the role of geometry in Kessler's work. It is critical to Kessler's process as well as the way the works are seen.
Michael Kessler's painterly logic seems to include organic geometry such as fractals. But much of it stems from the spiritually loose forms of Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism or the subtlety of Ad Reinhart's quiet canvases.
It is in the relationship between geometric and organic logic where Kessler's artistic decisions are most apparent. His aesthetic is very strong and yet extremely subtle. For example, Kessler sees the color white as having unlimited potential: white might be darkened or shifted by age, wear or proximity to other colors. The textures of an area change the way it reads and feels. By working with transparency and translucency, Kessler pushes the paint further still. While he has an extremely strong sense of the graphic and compositional structures, Kessler's paintings focus intensely on textures and depth.
Some of the main texture-oriented themes in Michael Kessler's paintings involve natural processes such as sedimentation and erosion. While these might be seen simply as opposites (one is the building up of matter while the other is the washing away of matter), the sedimentary layers of Kessler’s paintings (very naturally) have eroded textures. This is a key element of Kessler's painting processes, many of which involve laying out paint and scraping most of it back off the surface. It is not by chance that many of his techniques mirror the processes of nature. According to Kessler, "Nature is my model and transformation is my subject matter."
Michael Kessler grew up on a farm and was always aware of the "organic processes in everything you see and do." Not surprisingly, his earliest major influence was Andrew Wyeth, largely because of the sense of nature in the textures of the work. When he went to college to study painting, he "had the Wyeth thing down" but developed a fascination with contemporary painting. He won a Whitney Museum Independent Study residency at the time and went to New York. Soon he had achieved what he calls a "quantum leap from Wyeth" to the issues and content of Minimalism and more reductive contemporary painting.
Originally from Hanover, Pennsylvania, Michael Kessler received a B.F.A. from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania in 1978. His awards include the Rome Prize for Painting from the American Academy in Rome and the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Award in Painting. Kessler's paintings are held in more than 100 public collections and 30 museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Brooklyn Museum: the Columbus Museum of Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The artist now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.
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