Frieze
October 26, 2012
Alex Olson’s paintings are less decorous than they seem at first
glance. In fact, high drama is often hidden behind their moderate scale,
formal elegance and sense of containment, which belie how assertively
her work wrestles with paint as both material and sign. Marks that seem
familiar quickly become unfamiliar; colour functions in surprising ways.
Her paintings also suggest a conflicting array of actions that include
spreading, pouring, wiping, scraping, abrading and sponging, but also
writing or leafing through books.
In previous works, Olson overlaid scrawled grids or fields of cursive marks or scratches with radiant splotches, graphic squiggles and flat areas of paint. Something different was going on in the paintings in her most recent show ‘Palmist and Editor’, which featured varied pairings exploring tensions between contradictory ways of presenting or interpreting information; this syntactical gamesmanship extended to interplay between the paintings. The show’s title suggested both an expansion of possibilities and a paring down – as well as the textured lines of the palm and the smoothed-out lines of text associated with editing – and similar disjunctions were at work throughout the show.
The paintings hung nearly flush with the walls, on thin stretchers, directing attention to the surfaces of the works, which could be read in various ways. Olson uses mundane, even crude, tools – palette knives, window scrapers, cheap brushes – to create discrete layers of alternately delicate and emphatic indexical marks. Some works are built on a layer of paint textured with allover brushstrokes or swirls that recall the patterns on cheaply plastered ceilings. The paint Olson then applies either delicately stains the grooves or sits atop it in a thick, opaque layer. Relay (all works 2012), one of the larger works in the show, initially suggests two elegant decorative columns of blossoms or birds, but the feathery shapes are simply areas of paint that seem to have been sponged on – or sponged on and wiped off – over the textured ground.
In the more comical Divulge, a wide pinkish band with wavy sides like the cartoonish result of a huge tool dragging paint down the canvas at an angle, is layered over a charcoal-grey ground textured with allover spirals. If flesh, or silly putty, could be squeegeed onto a surface, it might resemble this emphatic pink shape. Divulge is one of several paintings in which Olson has neatly applied thick swathes or stripes while leaving a messy edge. It’s as if with the same gesture she’s depicting a brick and the cement oozing beneath it: both stasis and movement, solid and liquid. In Place, wide blue and white lines made with a palette knife – leaving a ridge of paint where the knife was lifted from the canvas – create a Rothko-esque composition: a larger rectangle formed of white marks stacked on a smaller one formed of blue marks, on a tan ground. The ground also evokes aged paper, just as the jaunty arrangement of lines somehow recalls mid-century illustration, making the lines’ heft all the more startling.
In Place and other works in the show, high Modernist painting seemed to be a distant touchstone. Palms for an Editor suggests a muted echo of work by Barnett Newman – with red layered over blue in a stripe down the centre of the canvas, against a mottled grey background – although the scale is closer to that of a reproduction in a lavish coffee-table book and the motivation entirely different. In all of Olson’s work it’s as though surfaces have been placed under a spotlight to better allow them to be read, interpreted and speak to one another.
-Kristen M. Jones
In previous works, Olson overlaid scrawled grids or fields of cursive marks or scratches with radiant splotches, graphic squiggles and flat areas of paint. Something different was going on in the paintings in her most recent show ‘Palmist and Editor’, which featured varied pairings exploring tensions between contradictory ways of presenting or interpreting information; this syntactical gamesmanship extended to interplay between the paintings. The show’s title suggested both an expansion of possibilities and a paring down – as well as the textured lines of the palm and the smoothed-out lines of text associated with editing – and similar disjunctions were at work throughout the show.
The paintings hung nearly flush with the walls, on thin stretchers, directing attention to the surfaces of the works, which could be read in various ways. Olson uses mundane, even crude, tools – palette knives, window scrapers, cheap brushes – to create discrete layers of alternately delicate and emphatic indexical marks. Some works are built on a layer of paint textured with allover brushstrokes or swirls that recall the patterns on cheaply plastered ceilings. The paint Olson then applies either delicately stains the grooves or sits atop it in a thick, opaque layer. Relay (all works 2012), one of the larger works in the show, initially suggests two elegant decorative columns of blossoms or birds, but the feathery shapes are simply areas of paint that seem to have been sponged on – or sponged on and wiped off – over the textured ground.
In the more comical Divulge, a wide pinkish band with wavy sides like the cartoonish result of a huge tool dragging paint down the canvas at an angle, is layered over a charcoal-grey ground textured with allover spirals. If flesh, or silly putty, could be squeegeed onto a surface, it might resemble this emphatic pink shape. Divulge is one of several paintings in which Olson has neatly applied thick swathes or stripes while leaving a messy edge. It’s as if with the same gesture she’s depicting a brick and the cement oozing beneath it: both stasis and movement, solid and liquid. In Place, wide blue and white lines made with a palette knife – leaving a ridge of paint where the knife was lifted from the canvas – create a Rothko-esque composition: a larger rectangle formed of white marks stacked on a smaller one formed of blue marks, on a tan ground. The ground also evokes aged paper, just as the jaunty arrangement of lines somehow recalls mid-century illustration, making the lines’ heft all the more startling.
In Place and other works in the show, high Modernist painting seemed to be a distant touchstone. Palms for an Editor suggests a muted echo of work by Barnett Newman – with red layered over blue in a stripe down the centre of the canvas, against a mottled grey background – although the scale is closer to that of a reproduction in a lavish coffee-table book and the motivation entirely different. In all of Olson’s work it’s as though surfaces have been placed under a spotlight to better allow them to be read, interpreted and speak to one another.
-Kristen M. Jones
Walker Art Center Blog
October 5, 2012
In this series of online studio visits, the 15 artists in the upcoming Walker-organized exhibition Painter Painter respond
to an open-ended query about their practices. Here Los Angeles–based
artist Alex Olson converses with exhibition co-curator Eric Crosby.
Eric Crosby
To begin, let’s start with appearances. Whenever I encounter one of your paintings, I learn something new about paint—its materiality, its consistency, its presence as image and surface. What is paint to you, and how do you describe your use of it.
Alex Olson
I’d say there are two main qualities of paint, specifically oil paint, that especially appeal to me. One is its enormous range as a material. Depending on how it’s applied, it can read from graphic to visceral. Most of my paintings take full advantage of this quality, incorporating a variety of tools and marks to arrive at the finished piece. The second quality is its extensive history. It’s impossible to make a mark at this point that doesn’t come with a historical referent, but this is actually a huge benefit. You can pull from art history’s enormous catalogue and build off of a past meaning, re-situating it in the present toward a different end. In doing so, it’s important to understand how a specific mark or idea functioned in the past versus now, and to consider what using it now would mean, but this creates even richer possibilities to choose from.
Eric Crosby
To begin, let’s start with appearances. Whenever I encounter one of your paintings, I learn something new about paint—its materiality, its consistency, its presence as image and surface. What is paint to you, and how do you describe your use of it.
Alex Olson
I’d say there are two main qualities of paint, specifically oil paint, that especially appeal to me. One is its enormous range as a material. Depending on how it’s applied, it can read from graphic to visceral. Most of my paintings take full advantage of this quality, incorporating a variety of tools and marks to arrive at the finished piece. The second quality is its extensive history. It’s impossible to make a mark at this point that doesn’t come with a historical referent, but this is actually a huge benefit. You can pull from art history’s enormous catalogue and build off of a past meaning, re-situating it in the present toward a different end. In doing so, it’s important to understand how a specific mark or idea functioned in the past versus now, and to consider what using it now would mean, but this creates even richer possibilities to choose from.
art ltd.
July 1, 2012
Painter Alex Olson contributes five works to the biennial
that reach equally into the archives of AbEx and Minimalism, sparking a
lively dialogue between the two. Olsen received her BA from Harvard and
subsequently studied at CalArts, where she received her MFA in 2008; her
practice combines additive and subtractive processes--impasto,
sgraffito; sgraffito, impasto--suggesting a synthesis of her bicoastal
education with a leaning towards historic influences. In her previous
body of work, she explored abstraction with a Twombly-esque edge: a
persistent scrawling relief scratched into the surface of her works
ranging from a misshapen modernist grid to chaotic scrawling lines
overlaid with thick patches of paint. Two of the works seen at the
Hammer, Proposal 1 and 3 continue
that explosive energy with bright multi-colored graffiti, while the
others seem to have found a means of control without any measurable loss
of passion. In Proposal 2, a transcendent
white-on-silvery-white creation evoking equal helpings of James Hayward
and Mary Corse, revels in pure luminosity. At the end of the lineup, Proposal 5,
a curved stripe runs off the upper edge of the canvas, painted in a
striking peach-on-charcoal combination, suggesting the infinite
expansion of space and possibilities left open to explore.
-Molly Enholm
-Molly Enholm
Interview Magazine
August 20, 2010
Once upon a time, in the 1960s, if you were a "good" painter,
according to contentious critic Clement Greenberg, you made abstract
works with big block of color and a little bit of shading to acknowledge
that no matter how hard you try, there's still always some sense of 3-D
illusion involved when pigment gets on canvas. Half a century later, a
"good" artist makes no fuss about a painting's status as an object.
Which is why 32-year-old Los Angeles-based painter Alex Olson finds
herself in the middle. "My paintings have to do with how you read
surfaces," the CalArts graduate says, referring to her groups of works
on very thin stretchers that aren't quite a series but "a giant
conversation among paintings, some of them louder than others." If her
paintings could talk, they'd speak of recurring, very basic shapes, and
thin brushy oils. "They're of an abstract vernacular but with loads of
signification," Olson says of the deceptive shadows under her flat
painterly patterns. Olson makes her solo New York debut at Lisa Cooley
gallery on September 1.-Alex Gartenfeld
No comments:
Post a Comment