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Email PageJack Hallberg 2006
December 7, 2006- January 27, 2007
Reception: December 7, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Jack Hallberg
CUE Art Foundation
511 W 25th St Jack Hallberg 2823... (2006) |
“They are full of art history, of course, and I can cite references. Seurat? Certainly. Pollock? Of course, but through Lichtenstein. West Coast abstraction? Absolutely. Ultralounge Vegas, Sci-Fi Surrealism and Kenny Scharf? Without a doubt. But none of these references address or explain the charm and equanimity of Hallberg’s paintings.”
– Dave Hickey
Jack Hallberg's recent series of acrylic-on-panel paintings on view, are composed of thousands of tactile, semi-opaque, raised dots painted in a spectrum of soft pastel colors. Individually affixed to each painting, they rise up from the canvas like tiny undulating mountains, and rest atop curving loops and spiral ribbons in patterns resembling cartoon-like strands of DNA.
Referencing the building blocks of the molecular and digital age, these dot-like forms have the transformative ability to create illusions of space. By placing his dots high in the middle, and flush towards the corners of his paintings, his treatment of surface draws the viewer in. Yet, Hallberg wants the background to be just as intriguing, and varying the background with cooler colors increases the sense of dimensionality within his work. Though the precision and repetition of form featured in his finely-tuned compositions may outwardly appear mechanized, his process is obsessively hand made. Raised dots are individually formed by squeezing standard acrylic paint directly onto wax paper in batches ranging from 50 to several hundred at a time. Once flattened into mounds by using the end of a paint tube, the height and diameter of each disc-like shape are carefully calibrated for consistency, before being affixed onto the canvas. This meticulous, time-consuming process is wryly celebrated through the titles of his paintings, which denote the amount of dots contained in each canvas.
While the overall sense of movement throughout these works is lyrical, Hallberg likes to inject a little tension into his peaceful, sedate environments. His dense, interlocking patterns, formed by strands cutting through each other, often require the slicing of some of these perfectly formed dollops of paint. In work such as 2103 …, where orange and white loops pass over each other over at least 100 times, many of these intersections are slightly awry.
These instants constitute for the artist “key moments” in his paintings when the hand made becomes visible, thus undermining the distance between artifice and reality. Representing his largest work to date, the diptych 2823… also compositionally alludes to a false/authentic balance as background, shape, and lines flow contiguously between both painted panels, blissfully indifferent to the space which separates them.
Hallberg subscribes to the maxim that solid composition will hold water, and these playful, visually engaging, textural paintings emphatically express how positive emotions can be a pleasure to behold.
Related Public Programs: Friday, December 8, 2006, 6:30pm Dave Hickey, Las Vegas based art critic and Jack Hallberg Exhibition Curator in conversation with William Corbett.
NB: Public programs at CUE are FREE but reservations ARE required. Please call 212 206-3583 or email info@cueartfoundation.org to reserve a seat.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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CUE Art Foundation was last updated: 2008-10-10
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