RETINAL FETISH July 16 - August 14, 1999 Reception July 16 @ 8pm
Curated by Christoph Grunenberg curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and newly appointed Curator of Post 1960 Collections for The Tate Gallery, London.

Retinal Fetish celebrates the artificiality and velocity of contemporary culture through dizzying optical effects, exuberant colors and the play of the illusions of material textures and synthetic surfaces. Presenting diverse approaches to art making today, the works in the exhibition range from the extreme reduction of formal means and progressive sophistication of painterly techniques to the liberal appropriation of imagery, icons and materials from so-called "low" art forms. Fascinated by the retinal stimulation and hyperconscious visual experiences produced by Op and Pop Art, Color-field and Pattern Painting, the artists in the exhibition reinvest the stylistic and formal vocabulary of 60s abstraction and decoration with a renewed visual energy and immediacy of meaning.

In his series of canvases, Gail Peter Borden constructs enigmatic conceptual and architectural spaces. Integrating a variety of surface textures and materials unprimed canvas, geometric shapes of bright color, collage elements employing paper and other materials as well as amorphous marks of thick, pasty paint-his works oscillate ambiguously between abstraction and figuration.

David Kelley's small rectangular and oval canvases are as much investigations into the mechanics and materials of painting as into the process of cognitive perception. Divided horizontally or vertically into sections of bright color and covered by uniform fields of black, slightly irregular dots, the canvases are arranged into decorative assemblies that result in a highly stimulating environment of shifting optical effects.

Alexander Scott juxtaposes painted wood-grain imitation surfaces with fields of pastel color inscribed with dynamic graphic symbols. His paintings celebrate the synthetic elegance of 60s interior decoration and artificiality of fast food chains while serendipitously paying homage to the masters of Cubism. Influenced as much by Jean Arp and David Lynch as by 70s "supagraphics" and techno music, Scott's paintings are located in the uncertain territory between art and design, abstraction and decoration.

Bill Thompson's most recent series of square paintings play with the opposing forces of visual and tactile attraction and the repulsion exuded by impenetrable surfaces that keep the viewer a distance. Multiple layers of automobile paint result in luscious, monochrome surfaces of intense color that almost fetishistically celebrate the modernist obsession with the picture plane's flatness. At the same time, the paintings' wavy surface structure approximates them to sculptural objects. The smooth finish produces constantly changing, almost psychedelic reflections of their environment obliquely alluding to landscape painting as well as to the polished and seductive surfaces of highly desirable consumer objects.

In his deferential homages to the masters of Op Art and Victor Vasarely in particular, Brian Zink employs both figurative and abstract decals behind clear and colored sheets of plexiglass. Dynamic stripes are reconfigured into intricate, potentially endlessly extendible patterns that point to the aesthetic promise inherent in the disdained materials, geometric patterns and stylized imagery of the custom car culture.

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