- Venue
- University Gallery, California
- Location
It is intriguing to learn, considering the intensely saturated colors they employ, that the recent pictures of Nolan Preece, now on view at the CSU Stanislaus University Gallery were made in total darkness. I believe it is this disjunction between their manner of manufacture and the brilliance and clarity of the resulting image that makes these works essentially surrealist despite their imagery. Ostensibly the images are about formal explorations of the simplest components of visual art: lines and geometrical shapes, and the simplicity seems to open the way for exploration of color properties in the manner of Joseph Albers or Kenneth Noland. Considering the unlikely method of their fabrication, this allusion is merely a tease, a subtle joke at those artists’ expense. The work is about as disingenuous as the exhibition title, “Simple Systems” Not that these pictures are flippant in any way, merely that the use of such pared-down formal elements allows the mystery surrounding the mechanics of their creation to be fore-grounded.
The images are a type of hybrid between printmaking and photography while behaving more like paintings than either. The intense saturations evoke the expectation of color field effects only to go beyond them. The shapes are restricted to approximate rectangles and circles and occupy an unsettling yet compelling relationship to the brightly colored backgrounds. Both shape and ground are ethereal and immaterial in feeling and the dazzling intensity of color renders them more so as if they might be derived from direct views of some solar body. They appear to be made of colored light, which the delicate paper surface has somehow intercepted.
These observations are corroborated by the fact that the images are produced by directing light from a color enlarger, through a carefully articulated range of filters onto extremely light sensitive paper. Objects are placed on this paper in total darkness, and therefore with a degree of accident, to act as barriers or filters or transmitters of this colored light. The filters on the enlarger are moved and thus can be exaggerated during exposure and it is this that creates the intense saturations. The resulting image is technically a chromogenic print of a photogram.
Not surprisingly the resulting photograms have a hyper-chemical quality as if we are witnessing the results of some bizarre optical experiment. The way colors relate, both within fields of a finely nuanced single hue and between chromatically distinct shapes, appears directly chemical. In other words the intensity of the colors in relation to each other does not make us aware of optical effects so much as a chemical interaction, as if we are witnessing a dialogue between the compounds of which the colors are formed rather than the actual colors. The Surrealist subtext of the work seems to lie precisely in the unsettling distance created by our expectation that works this colorful must be about color in some way. Instead they seem to suggest the subversion of color through its very intensity, which makes them quite difficult to take in and curiously elusive in meaning. This, in conjunction with a range of subtle textural effects and ghosts of light fraying the edges of many of the shapes, might suggest our presence at the inception of some cosmic event whether it be the collapse of a star or the birth of a cell, an event however, which may just turn out to be a compelling hoax, an epiphenomenon of our consciousness.
Ultimately these not-so-simple systems systematically undermine our natural approaches to the spectacle they present to ultimately appear as optical illusions despite, or is it because of, their hyperbolic saturations.
Artist writer
