ART CITIES:Paris-Josh Sperling
JoshSperling’s works on canvas waves between wall sculptures and paintings. Building layered plywood structures by hand, the artist stretches canvas over these forms to create a subtle relief. The structures range from angular and geometric to organic reminiscent of fibers and cells. Light and shadow interact with the facets of the pieces, creating an enhanced illusion of depth. Adding to this, Sperling uses bold, monochromatic hues that play with bright contrast and unexpected color combinations that appeal and delight the visual senses.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Perrotin Archive
JoshSperling in his solo solo exhibition “Chasing Rainbows” at Galerie Perrotin in Paris presents a number of new works: composites or shaped canvases and plywood panels, a series of monochrome canvas reliefs, and a large-scale installation. Sperling’s range of influences is broad. Frank Stella and his shaped canvases are clear predecessors for the meticulously crafted supports over which Sperling stretches his canvases. In this, Sperling resembles Ellsworth Kelly, whose signature hard-edge shapes took near-sculptural form in his later work. The components of each sculptural painting are made from stacked wooden shapes with painted canvas stretched around them. The pieces then fit together into a geometric puzzle. The texture created from the stacked wood below gives each shape an extra layer of interest. In “Poppycock” (2017), three ovals compete for prominence in the center of the composition, shuffling and re-shuffling before settling into a makeshift pile. A maroon arch buttresses them, cradling them into stillness. These snaking forms “squiggles”appear throughout Sperling’s work and act, alternately, as instigators and appeasers of movement: the maelstrom of forms that characterizes Sperling’s work. To execute a single “squiggle,” sheets of plywood are laid on top of each other, resembling a topographical model, before they are covered in canvas and painted over in Sperling’s signature palate of saturated, sometimes clashing colors. In “Lovey Dovey” (2017), a blue trident eclipses a pink orb. The overlap is rendered in a marbling of the two tones. So intense is the collision of shape and color, force against force, that the surface collapses and the colors co-mingle. Over this eclipse of forms, a single curve arches like an eyebrow in an expression of alarm, or like a crescent moon presiding over the collision and framing the event. Dots, one red and one white, act as a kind of punctuation. They are the only seemingly stable forms in an otherwise mercurial landscape of shape, color, and relation.
Info: Galerie Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 10/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
