Hyperlight
press release
Hyperlight
April 5th – May 5th , 2019.
Opening Reception: Friday, April 5th, 6:00 -9:00pm.
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday 1-4pm.
Adrianne Rubenstein
Catherine Haggarty
Delphine Hennelly
Doron Langberg
Marcel Hüppauff
Nora Griffin
Osamu Kobayashi
Curated by Sam Bornstein.
Hyperlight features seven painters using high-key color and light to hyper-integrate their painted worlds, evoke hyper-vibrant experience, or push the possibilities of what light and color can do in a painting. At once haptic and boundary blurring, the vibrant light and color utilized in these works is optically generous while remaining mysterious, giving us more without necessarily giving too much away.
In an age when we are immersed in the projected and simulated light of the digital world, contemporary painters might be seen as reclaiming vibrancy as choice instead of techno-environment, as reflection instead of broadcast, or as meaningful instead of merely eye-catching. Even if these choices are not to be viewed as a détournement of a technologically inflected vibrancy, without question these artists have individually pushed the stakes of painting to a place that feels fresh and inventive.
In his landmark text Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests a possible outcome of our reactions to inventive, jarring, or exaggerated color and light: we might wake up. “We must – precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as paradox – rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.” Pushing just beyond the familiar, painters using even the most ancient painting devices are able to render these new and specific.
Underdonk
1329 Willoughby Ave #211 Brooklyn NY 11237
L train to Jefferson St
[email protected]
Hours: Sat – Sun 1- 6PM and by appointment
www.underdonk.com
