Camilla Fallon: The Navel is The Center
The Painting Center is pleased to present Playground featuring paintings by Portland-based artist Kim Smith Claudel in the Project Room.
The playground is a stage for imaginative theories. With endless freedom inside its boundary, it is both hyperreal and simultaneously detached from the real world. For Smith Claudel, painting abstraction is her playground鈥攁 space of not only invention and discovery but also risk and failure. These paintings, omnivorous with media and indifferent to craft, bring urgency and purpose amid a dance of action and reaction. Layers are masked and covered, scraped and excavated through a collaborative game that is invented as it goes.
These paintings are about play within the ground鈥攖he space in which figures can fit and drift, float and fall鈥攈eld weightless by the impossible gravity within a painting. Soft gradients like desert sunsets are cut with harsh lines, blurring our perception of figure and ground, near and far, beginning and end. Stenciled remnants hide and reveal awkward colors that are at times earthly, and at other times garish. Like play structures, these collaged constructions question pragmatic function. A bar to climb and swing, a mound to meander, a beam to teeter鈥攖he playgrounds are spaces to get lost in thought and play amid their provisional stability, knowing we could lose our footing at any moment鈥攖hough we may fall softly on the sand.
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The Painting Center is pleased to present Playground featuring paintings by Portland-based artist Kim Smith Claudel in the Project Room.
The playground is a stage for imaginative theories. With endless freedom inside its boundary, it is both hyperreal and simultaneously detached from the real world. For Smith Claudel, painting abstraction is her playground鈥攁 space of not only invention and discovery but also risk and failure. These paintings, omnivorous with media and indifferent to craft, bring urgency and purpose amid a dance of action and reaction. Layers are masked and covered, scraped and excavated through a collaborative game that is invented as it goes.
These paintings are about play within the ground鈥攖he space in which figures can fit and drift, float and fall鈥攈eld weightless by the impossible gravity within a painting. Soft gradients like desert sunsets are cut with harsh lines, blurring our perception of figure and ground, near and far, beginning and end. Stenciled remnants hide and reveal awkward colors that are at times earthly, and at other times garish. Like play structures, these collaged constructions question pragmatic function. A bar to climb and swing, a mound to meander, a beam to teeter鈥攖he playgrounds are spaces to get lost in thought and play amid their provisional stability, knowing we could lose our footing at any moment鈥攖hough we may fall softly on the sand.
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Following the fleshy path of Rubens, Lucian Freud, Joan Semmel, and Cecily Brown, among many others, Camilla Fallon has recently focused her loose, lush brushwork on the female body鈥檚 midsection, specifically the navel.
