ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: NOT DEAD, JUST EVOLVED
Abstract Expressionism was an art movement on the trend line of Modern & Contemporary Evolution. (Evolution is used here in a non-perjorative way, or to denigrate the past but to indicate a transition from one era to the next.) Just as it was an outgrowth of an artistic trend, so it was a nidus for further movements. This trend line began in the mid 18th Century with Manet and led to the Impressionist who desired to paint the view at a fleeting point in time, not with a homogeneous color palette, but the multihued and variegated color patterns altered by light and atmosphere. The Fauves took this one step further and painted not what they saw but what they felt about what they saw. Thus instead of realistic or local color they improvised with arbitrary color to expression these feelings or expressions, e.g. a blue face or a yellow sky, etc. Kandinsky continued this concept and ultimately painted the first non-figurative painting of just colors to express his emotions. Much later Mark Rothko began painting horizontal multilayered bands of color with great luminosity and depth and is considered the epitome of Abstract Expressionism. Other Abstract Expressionists like Motherwell, Stil, Frankenthaler, took this 'color field' approach in different directions and utilized the emphasis of scale with epic proportions. This period of the 1950's to 1960's was supplanted by the phase transitions of Rauschenberg and Johns with 'Combines' appropriated designs and led into the era of Op Art, Pop Art, and ultimately Installation Art.
The basic tenets and techniques of Abstract Expressionism did not die out or fade away but metamorphed into a more contemporary fashion. One example is artist Enrico Embroli of Albuquerque, NM. One sees in his paintings the remnants of Rothko's horizontal multilayered color bands, yet evolved from just a linear horizontal view to verticals and curvilinear forms. At times he references the color patches of Cezanne and Gauguin. Embroli not only scales these color swaths with added curvilinear forms he adds to them a heavy impasto with scrapings and trowel marks lending great depth to the paintings. In this context of color field paintings he often adds a small patch of another color, sometimes complementary or rarely very disparate. This shocks the eye, jolts the consciousness, and forces one to concentrate visual acuity onto a particular place in the painting. All the while it almost physically coerces the viewer to pause and contemplate the painting longer and in a different and almost hypnotic way. In some paintings there are almost pre-historic pictographs, occasionally resembling the glyph paintings of Bulgarian artists. They add a visual interest but simultaneously interrupt the flow of emotional release generated by the powerful colors and composition, almost a respite from one's self analysis.
Embroli evolves his own painting. He attaches constructed canvases together creating a diptych or triptych of sorts. These attached panels are often of a single color with or without embellishments of texture, and often of a totally different material such as metal attached to canvas. These multipaneled art constructions now bridge the gap between flat art and sculpture, not in a bas relief way but a dramatic scintillation as if the viewer's eye is oscillating between two and three dimensions. It causes one to ponder the variation in art, to realize we interpret paintings in a three dimensional way though, for the most part, they are only two dimensional. Thus the art argues for and simultaneously against the truth of our perceptions - not only of art, but our emotional and aesthetic response to it. How to see it, how to understand it, how to appreciate it. These duopolies of thought processes have plagued mankind for eons - mind/body, real/imagined, good/evil, art/non-art, etc. His art is not just beauty, from composition and line, but an adventure in color and an adventure in self-analysis; a review and conscious re-evaluation of who, what, and where we are. It is an intellectual and emotional testimony to the power of art.
C. Lawrence Decker
Art Consultant
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