Curator

Dallas Art Fair | Life is a Horizontal Fall

Academic

collector

gallerist

Jimmy Baker

Audio commentary

Here Baker is doing more within his own experimentation. The collaged framework breaks up any graph like formation, no horizone line, and everythin flows into the next image. Flowers, which are typically static and sitting comfortably now look like sun bursts or flames. Patterned abstraction takes on different shapes. Nothing has a formality and the experimention of different materials leaves the viewer breathless, trying to discern what is what. Or maybe it is about enjoying the magic. Don't try to figure it out.

Keijsers Koning

Burning out

Jimmy Baker does not just make what is traditionally known as a painting. Instead Baker uses a myriad of practices such as traditional oil painting combined with the untraditional digital collaging, with photography thrown in, allowing for a cacophony of visual expression while neatly tied together in a strong, organized image.

Double Walker

Matt Clark

Here Clark gives us abstraction in a different way. It is not all - over such as seen in This Desire Will Find An Opening, but it has a different vibe. Here the colors are heavy - each band of color has a major marking on the painting. Grouped together, your eyes go vertical, while the bands of color has you looking horizontally. And then there is the drips, almost as if he has created a tension, a moment of chaos, and takes one out of structure. Free floating within the chaos. 

Conduit Gallery

Diverse Strings into a Single Current

Mining the area of abstraction in painting, Clark's paintings are adept at using painterly ideas of compression, mark making, erasure, opacity and process to create a striking painting. He typically paints in a large scale enveloping the viewer in his manufactured environment

This Desire Will Find an Opening

Zach Bruder

Every art fair has what I call, a little gem. The painting that feels out of step with other works in the booth, yet is so striking ...that you can not take your eyes off it. Well painted, glorious painting of flowers done with vivacious colors. 

Magenta Plains

Jacqueminot

Nathaniel Robinson

Seemingly a banal image of a house and tree, Robinson is able to execute his work gorgeously and mixes natural with man made architeture in a way that the architecture, which at first feels dominate, becomes the frame for the dainty, fragile tree in the foreground. Perhaps a take on today's environmental concerns, done in a way that is inocuous, saying through imagery, "of course this is today's reality, yet take a look at what that reality has created." 

Untitled

Again, Robinson is working within the landscape genre, showing the viewer what looks like a nocturnal, predominantly black scene. It feels like we are 'wooshing' by, perhaps in a car. And what stands out, at a face pace, are the tips of the tree leaves and a red blare of possibly a house light. Your eye sweeps the canvas as instructed this imagery as opposed to the other image that I described, which is exponentially static. 

Elizabeth Magill

A master at painting, Magill's paintings are always gorgeous atmospheric creations somewhere in between landscape and illusion. In this painting, Green Source, Magill builds up what is a land mass that slowly rises. She creates a horizon line which allows the viewer's eyes to travel with the build up of the land mass. She dots the landscape with stars, or perhaps that is what one thinks it is, and has the landscape come to a point on the far right. As in Magill fashion, she goes from romantic to possible, if only we lived in a possible world. 

Kerlin Gallery

Greensound

One of Magill's more literal paintings, as she depicts trees in the landscape with pink and blue hues. As there is a grouping of trees, Magill has the viewer take in the whole painting as one image yet allows for one to see each tree individually, bringing to mind, 'seeing the forest through the trees'

Pink Mineral

Another sumptuous Magill painting, yet here the painting has a central image, what looks like a swirling mountain. Again, Magill uses the paint to create an atmospheric effect, the white swirls draws your eyes up to the top and the title, Smoulder, is exactly how the painting feels, smouldering! 

Smoulder

Kysa Johnson

Monet's waterlillies are a continual touchstone of influence in painting, specifically with landscape painting. That image is perhaps the quientissential landscape image of 20 - 21st century landscape painting. In her work, Kysa makes explicit homage to it, titling her paintings with the armature of 'after Monet'. Yet how contemporary the early 1900s image looks when it is re- done in bright colors, distinctivemark making - nothing washy, and on aluminum instead of canvas. The aluminum adds a sleek feeling, creating more contemporary-ness to the work. And has you make no mistake, you will not think of this work as a sleepy pretty picture of flowers. 

Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art

blow up 403 - Crude - phytoplankton after Monet

Here Johnson has continued her Monet waterlilly theme, yet the image is smaller and the mark making is tighter, more of a cacophony of ringlets. With the closeness of the marks, Johnson erases a specific horizon line, yet with the title referring to 'after Monet' you still read the painting like a landscape. Just much messier!

blow up 391 - Crude (life) - phytoplankton after Monet

With the works that I selected from the Dallas Art Fair, the works are all paintings, and the majority of them are horizontal. Why a painter chooses vertical or horizontal orientation, is a question that I have discussed with many artists. 
The responses are predominantly that the vertical feels like the body- it typically represents the size of the artist - and I assume is an easier format because of this. The horizontal, specifically in art historical contexts, assumes a landscape, which in the selected works, is the case. Artists are thinking about these definitions, utilize it or rub against it, creating an important frame work for the painting, and perhaps it is metaphorical for….life.				

Dallas Art Fair | Life is a Horizontal Fall

Curated by Sima Familant