ART-PRESENTATION: Brent Wadden-Zerodayolds

Brent Wadden is a Vancouver and Berlin-based artist who has shown his work in Berlin for nearly a decade. He works on a loom to create geometric woven paintings. The weavings are tight and methodical. It is hard to know while looking at them if they were made by human labor or a machine, but the occasional imperfections, a bulge or a gap in the weaving, hint toward the former.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Peres Projects Archive

Brent Wadden in “zerodayolds” his solo exhibition at Peres Projects in Berlin, presents a new series of works which furthers his investigation of color and form. Composed of woven fibers, sewn and mounted on canvas, the artist’s abstract works complicate the painterly notion of surface, while reconsidering the concept of the handmade. Wadden typically uses fibers including wool, cotton, and acrylic to create his visually jagged, yet simultaneously mutable geometric constructions. Conscious of the density and tension of his materials and practice, Wadden’s focus on form seeks to physically meld the aesthetic gender and status roles associated with craft and abstraction. As the artist says “I hope my paintings create some amount of confusion in the viewer which would lead to a fascination with the process”. Wadden is not a professionally trained weaver, the artist spent his mid-20s in Berlin, one of his friends, Travis Meinolf, taught him how to weave, therefore his work  deals more in the history of painting than in that of textile arts or craft weaving. “Explaining the weavings as paintings makes sense to me. It’s more dealing with the history of painting, less the history of weaving and textile art. I’m an untrained weaver; someone who is traditionally trained would do things a lot differently”. Working in contrast to traditional painting methods, Wadden’s compositions are determined only during the final stages of preparation, and the use of light and dark create a stark positive and negative spaces, which optically shift from foreground to background.

Info: Peres Projects, Karl-Marx-Allee 82, Berlin, Duration: 28/4-9/6/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com/