John Natsoulas Gallery

Exhibition Dates: December 5- 29, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday,December 8, 7-10 pm
Special lecture: by New York Art Critic, Dominique Nahas, 7:30 pm

The John Natsoulas Gallery is proud to present to the American public the abstract and figurative paintings and collages of Anglo-Irish artist, John Kingerlee.. Exhibited in this survey of Kingerlee s work are paintings the artist executed after moving, in the early 1980s, to the remote Beara peninsula in southwest Ireland. The centerpiece of the exhibition, curated by New York-based art critic William Zimmer, is work from the Grid Series, each panel of which consists of a grid of color built up over the course of years, creating deep squares of paint evocative of the rugged landscape. The Grids are deeply imbued with Kingerlee s lifestyle decision to live in a remote locale, at one with the landscape, bearing the hardships of daily life, in order to paint, and only paint.

The Grids series commenced in December, 1998, when Kingerlee visited the hill of Tara, in County Meath, Ireland, the ancestral seat and burial place of the high kings of Ireland. While the present condition of the site is hardly imposing, the thought of all of the buried history there inspired Kingerlee to begin to experiment with oil paintings where strata are accumulated over time until one arrives at an abstract surface as dense with hidden meaning as the Tara hill. Kingerlee terms each unit of a Grid a plaque, which consists of a raised textured surface, to which coat after coat of paint has been added. Each time Kingerlee adds a coat the chance occurrences of the process of coverage and exposure reveal (to him) hints of landscapes, figures, architecture, and even purely abstract presence. While some Grids are white, grey, or yellow (a color Kingerlee favors, as Turner had, for its warm light), they often hide dark or even black layers--the traces of the under-painted colors thus give a voice to apparently mute surfaces.

What separates Kingerlee's mode of abstraction, ultimately derived from the Tachist and Cobra artists of the 1950s, from formalist abstraction, is that, just as it took time to build up the grids, so the viewer must take his or her time to experience the work. For Kingerlee, his pictures are like small movies, constantly changing, always developing, continually evolving. Kingerlee has also described his Grids as comparable in their structure to the portmanteau words devised by James Joyce in Finnegan' s Wake, where one composite word hides the fleeting suggestion of many other words, altering the word's meaning (or even pronunciation) every time one reads it.

While Kingerlee has, in his art, set out on what medieval Irish monks would term - the long way, his art links up, in the history of modern art, to the painting of the Art Brut, Tachist, and Cobra groups in the 1950s. Kingerlee especially favors the Danish artist Asger Jorn, who likewise put images down in paint and then gesturally responded to them. Kingerlee sees parallels between some tendencies of his drawings--on everything from pages of old novels, to postage stamps, to ticket stubs--and graffiti art, and also admires the accumulative mark-making of Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the 1960s and 1970s Kingerlee's art made use of automatic techniques, such as blots of ink onto damp paper or dense conglomerations of design, after the model of the surrealists. Kingerlee also worked in ceramics in the 1970s, the kneading of clay leaving a permanent imprint on his later painting.

This exhibition at the John Natsoulas Gallery and Center for the Arts represents the only West Coast opportunity to experience Kingerlee's work before it begins a two-year museum tour.

This exhibition courtesy of Katharine T. Carter, Katharine T. Carter & Assoc., NY.