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Press Release Texas Gallery announces an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by New York - based artist, Robert Mangold. Mangold's canvases combines saturated colors and drawn lines that go beyond any labels of "minimalism" or "serial imagery." While the shaped paintings from the early 70's followed formal rules of composition involving diagonals, arcs and angles, the surface colors and textures were evocative of humble everyday materials. Now in the later work the colors relate more closely to the sublime hues found in early Renaissance paintings and frescos while the column shapes bring to mind classical Roman and early Christian architecture. The attenuated canvases with a vertical height over 10 feet and a width of 2 feet are inscribed with a grid and multiple sinuous graphite lines that vary in weight and density. The echoing and counterbalancing of these curves create an illusion of rounded space like a column in a church or a peristyle while also reminding the viewer of the familiar illustration of DNA sequences. The artist describes his effort in a manner as straightforward as the works themselves and as a method of building to an understanding: "I am referring…to the very personal, intense relationship you can have with a work. I am not sure I want the work to provide a contemplative mood either, rather I want the work to cause me to drop everything and slowly pick up the pieces and enter into a dialogue with it." However, the author Francine Prose, elucidates the resulting ineffable results of these paintings as well: "The longer you spend with a Mangold painting the more it has to tell you, so that the experience of looking-like entering a Baroque church, listening to a raga, studying a Greek vase - expands over space and time, at once projecting into the future and lodging in our consciousness in irreducible, inexpressible ways." For further information, please contact Nancy Douthey. Texas Gallery |