While I work on my next essay for ArtMonkeyWrench, I thought it might be a good idea to start posting previous catalogue essays and old reviews that are not otherwise available online (which in our modern world means that they do not exist). In honor of Don Voisine’s current exhibition “Don Voisine: Blues and the Abstract Truth” at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco, I am starting with this essay I wrote for his 2009 catalogue at McKenzie Fine Art, NYC.
Don Voisine
High Time, 2008
Oil on Wood
44 x 44 inches
I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was no Space;
I was myself, and not myself.
From Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot
There is a world around us that we cannot see. Not the subatomic universe or the span of waves below and above the visible spectrum – although our awareness of these things echoes in our consciousness against this unseen world. But it is a world we can feel surrounding us none-the-less. We know with certainty it is there and even, on rare occasions, catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of our eye. We somehow know, too, that whatever small part of the world appears visible to us as answers, the vast remainder lies beneath the surface of this invisible world. So we build tools out of the mundane materials we have at our disposal in an attempt to view it and, hopefully, understand it.
These are my thoughts as I look at High Time, a painting by Don Voisine. It is a simple square and the only five colors, applied in solid geometric shapes, are two blues, two blacks, and a white. The blues, a wide band of royal blue and a thin inner edge of sky blue, run equally along the top and bottom from side to side, framing the large white field that acts as the ground. Moving from the upper left to the lower right across the white is a broad band of charcoal black which stops, unexpectedly, just short of the sky blue edges. From off the lower left edge moving up and off the right edge, cutting in front of the charcoal black to form an X, is an equally broad band of deeper carbon black. That, in short, might be considered a full description of High Time.
In fact, with small variations, it might serve as a description of all Voisine’s work: All of the paintings are oil on wood panels that are either square or rectangular. The shapes inside the paintings are also only squares, rectangles, or rhombi, often set on a diagonal, often forming an X shape. None of the paintings have fewer than three colors or more than six colors. In every painting two of the colors are always white and black. The surfaces are all unvarnished. While few painters today work with such a spare palette, Voisine’s aesthetic aligns easily with predecessors like John McLaughlin and Myron Stout.
Reading this one might naturally assume that Voisine’s paintings are flat, that they appear as completely and totally without dimension as the thin layers of paint from which they were created. But here’s the thing, and it’s a fairly big thing: High Time is not flat. It does not depict 3-dimensional space in the least, and yet it is not flat.
Where is the dimensionality? Look first to where the two bands of black cross and, in spite of the paint touching (or maybe even because the paint is touching), there exists a nearly indescribable yet undeniable gap. Clearly the paint overlaps and just as clearly we perceive space. What kind of space? Imagine two black magnets between your fingers arranged positive-to-positive, negative-to-negative, forever in opposition sliding this way and that against each other so that no matter how much you try to force them, they can never touch. It is exactly that kind of charged space.
Then there is the edge between the black band on the top and the white ground on which it sits. Although “sits” is surely the wrong word, for the relationship between the two colors is anything but static. Instead, there appears to our eye a faint yet discernable vibration. No, it is more than that; it practically snaps before our eyes, as the black seems eternally unable to find a resting place in the white expanse that surrounds it.
Don Voisine
Veer, 2008
Oil on Wood
32 x 60 inches
Now, an aside for the readers of this essay unfortunate enough not to see the actual work, those readers who can only look at the reproductions in this catalog. You will no doubt note that it is very hard to see the visual effects I am describing in the photograph of the painting. We have become used to viewing art presented in a multitude of formats – photographs, drawings, videos, sculptures, paintings – and since most images are indifferent to their means of production, we expect those means to be interchangeable as well. But it is important to recognize that some information is inseparable from its materials and process, that is, certain information simply cannot be translated or reproduced. When that is the case, as it is with Voisine’s paintings, it is critical to appreciate its affect on our potential for deeper understanding. All the more so because the next dimension to explore manifests from the inherent quality in the paint and is present, without fail, in all of the artist’s works.
This space is not found at the intersection of two colors or at the edge of the forms, but in their center, in the black. At the center of every Don Voisine painting is black. Not just the color black rendered in the multitude of varying tones and gradations that Voisine has under his control, but blackness. It is more than merely the absence of color in the scientific sense and more than the subtle variation of the Mars, Bone, or Lamp black in the painterly sense; the black before us absolutely requires us to perceive it spatially. More than that, though, because the paintings are flat, because they offer no traditional perspective or rendered space, neither can they confine or limit the absence conjured by this blackness. The effect of which is to create the impression of an endless depth, an abyss.
Don Voisine
Parisian Heiress, 2008
Oil on Wood
32 x 32 inches
Geometric and flat as they are, and as counter-intuitive as it may be, it is now clear that these painting’s dimensionality is striking, insistent, and multi-faceted. It is a dimensionality that resonates beyond itself, moving up from black centers, evoking thoughts that are as complex and deep as they are open-ended: what are the boundaries of the world around us, what are the limits of seeing, how does the infinite reconcile with our own finite existence.
In light of this, it is good to be reminded that experiencing Voisine’s paintings could hardly be described as overbearing. The electrically alive colors, for one, will not allow it to be. Zipping as they do back and forth across the painting’s north and south extremes, they serve to contain whatever darkness is within their field. The overt playfulness of all of the paintings, too, provides a powerful counterpoint to the darker undercurrents.
Voisine compresses the world we know and the world we cannot know onto his painted wooden panels. There, like a drop of pond water still teaming with life and captured between two glass slides, he presents this universe for us to magnify and expand with our looking and insight. That the artist can do this seamlessly and with an absolute minimum of gesture speaks of the lessons learned from thirty years with brush in hand, with the current body of work representing a concise and important summation of what he learned to date.
Deven Golden
March 2009
