Jon Knowles
Rubbing the Kaki

Exhibition: April 18th 2015 – May 30th  2015
Vernissage: Saturday April 18th at 4 pm

Galerie Donald Browne is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Jon Knowles.

Rubbing the Kaki is the third in a string of exhibitions that elaborate on the artists’ ongoing interest in procedural abstraction and its relation to other discursive formations (education, art markets, criticism-discourse, popular media).

In these paintings — as in the previous series of works presented in the exhibitions Blood Oranges in 2012 and I’m Only in it for the Manet in 2013 — raw canvas and linen have been misted with hundreds of layers of diluted acrylic polymer in primary colours:  first yellow, then red, and finally blue. This triad of colours is sprayed over and over, ad infinitum, until the additive layering of these prismatic colours coagulate into an earth tone. With this group of paintings, the attempt to push toward the depths of an iconic black is attenuated. Modeling and a semblance of composition is evident so that layers, spray marks are apprehendable. The actual marks are minute particles of paint drips/blotches/stains that add up to the whole, understood loosely here as a monochrome.  Sprayed particulates of pure colour are literalized here as an aggregate of three varied liquid bases.

Concentration of colour leads to absorption, which then leads to saturation. Saturation (both literal and metaphorical) invariably traverses towards a state of distraction (looking away, or thoughts leading elsewhere, one might even call it: an aesthetic experience). As distraction emerges, this sometimes signales a state of completion; whereas other times, notions of ‘perfection’ interupt the process, and so the painting continues (and invariably remains in the studio, ébauche).

(Text: Galerie Donald Browne)
More info: www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com