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To see other available work, click here: Waterston
Purchase the exhibition catalog: Order Catalog
"In his 7th one-person exhibition with Greg Kucera Gallery, Darren Waterston broadened the scope of his previously established imagery along with the variability of his paint surfaces. Though floating organic forms and a vague sense of aqueous or unearthly environment remain as imagery, any specific reading of them has become deliberately more ambiguous. Any literal reference to a traditional, Western landscape present in earlier work has evolved into a lush, fluid, though entirely fictitious realm. Figurative elements, prominent in the paintings of the last few years, have given way to a diverse set of abstract elements of furry spore clusters, wiggling lozenge shapes, twining filaments, glowing haloed orbs, colonies of dots and spatters, and rectangular forms reminiscent of Mediterranean tesserae.
With subtle glazes of grays, whites, yellows and greens, Waterston's palette has shifted to more ethereal tones, though there are occasional brilliant or dark colors as well. The smoothly polished surface that has previously associated Waterston's paintings with traditional 19th century romantic style has become more complicated with small gestures of impasto and undulating trails of graduated colors of paint.
Waterston's recent exhibition featured 12 new oil paintings on wood, an installation of 20 small watercolors, and the largest painting Waterston has completed to date—a diptych measuring 8 x 12 feet. This grandly scaled work functions as a summation of the artist’s current painterly concerns. Here, the loosest gestures of impasto play off the tightest of his painterly skills. Web-like strings drip their mysterious secretions. Black rosettes vie for foreground space with loose red petals. Overall, an indeterminate atmosphere impedes a reading of pictorial space.
Waterston conflates botany with biology, the observable with the hidden, and abstraction with figuration to expose the universality of each. Waterston manages, through the use of elegiac imagery, to comment on contemporary reality in his troubled surfaces, painted traumas, cellular masses, glands and pustules — all mindful of the corporeal time in which we live." —Greg Kucera
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