Marjorie Welish’s abstract paintings are poststructuralist in their interplay of Repetition and Difference -- even of Deleuzean ‘differentials’ within one concept versus ‘differences’ between concepts, such as an interplay of two yellows as against not only ‘blue’ but two blues, or more recent diptychs wherein the color obtains across structural difference. Exemplary are the works in the series ‘Indecidability of the Sign Red Yellow Blue,’ which presumes the modernist topos of three primaries red/yellow/blue only to complicate it, for instance with a gradient consisting of the same yellow but with an admixture of black, producing an incommensurate palette —as a problem of ‘translation’ (i.e, ‘carrying-over’); or likewise, a palette of primaries whose differentials of a second red, a second yellow and two other blues, raise the question of which is the true red/yellow/blue. Besides recent diptychs on panels in the studio, the accompanying slide show illustrates certain exhibitions, including a show at the Denison University Museum, in Ohio, in which a painting from 1983-84, split between predetermined serial color sequence and ad hoc improvised chromatic (dis)order, is seen to lead eventually to Oaths, Questions, the recent artist-book collaboration with James Siena. Repetition and Difference are also seen in interplay in a small collaboration, The Napkin and Its Double, in which with, shown a proposal sketched by Buzz Spector on a napkin, Marjorie produced a copy on acetate with freehand addition of a phrase, which he, delighted, proceeded to title; after which this was produced as a multiple.)
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