Strange Waters
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Strange Waters, Dennis Kardon’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and the New York based artist’s first in London.
Dennis Kardon (b. 1950, Des Moines, Iowa) challenges painting’s potential by creating representational scenes that materialize from loose abstract brushstrokes. The artist treats the surface of his canvases as a field to which he assigns various properties like reflection and distortion, creating scenes in which a feeling of unexpected intimacy pervade.
Strange Waters comprises a selection of artworks made during the last four years which are instilled with the artist’s nuanced response to current events and personal memories. The artist wanted the title of the exhibition to reflect surviving the upheaval of the past four years and Kardon was attracted to a quote by Frank Herbert, the author of the 1965 science-fiction novel Dune, who considers survival to be ‘the ability to swim in strange water’. Water is a recurring element in Kardon’s paintings who uses its transparency as a disrupting lens. Water becomes a means of distortion: you can see through its surface, but not clearly, so you cannot be certain of what you are looking at. Water is a signature property of Kardon’s painting and representative of the illusory act of painting. Like painting, water can be looked into but distorts what it reveals.
Kardon—who originally began his career as an abstract painter, and still considers every element in his painting as formally abstract—nevertheless thinks that painting is, at its heart, a representational enterprise. Whether advancing an idea, or conjuring an object in the world, he thinks that painting is always creating representational systems. The thought and technical process behind each artwork, and the idea of painting itself, become subjects of the artist’s investigation. By starting with arbitrary abstract brushstrokes, Kardon plays with painting’s syntax by imaginatively re-contextualizing this earlier spontaneous painting and transforms each brushstroke into a possible signifier for something else. This allows meaning to arise through the way a viewer’s attention reassembles the signifiers that the painter has woven together. The artist works on the painting by following the play of his own attention; Kardon’s work is an exploration of the way orchestrating a viewer’s attention results in the construction of a kind of meaning that connects body with mind. Ambiguity informs all the artist’s production. Kardon thinks of the spectrum of ambiguities that he creates as a doorway for viewers to interact with the consciousness of the artist by using those uncertainties to try to assemble their own narratives.
Kardon has always been interested in the way the interaction of colors produces light and his ability to subtly manipulate the tonality of colors that can finely tune it. Light creates the mood in a painting and the disturbing period of the last four years was the catalyst for a study in creating very low light by juxtaposing colors that were very dark but specific in hue and value. The trilogy composed by Getting Help (2018), The News (2019) and Tipping Point (2019) shows the same scene occurring by night seen from different perspectives. Although set in the darkest night, the paintings are characterized by a deep nocturnal light produced by blurring the distinction of color edges. The trilogy was made during the social upheaval intensified by the Trump presidency and recreates that familiar mood alternating between constant anxiety and the desire for capitulation to obliviousness and total surrender of will. The paintings of the last year despite the threats of mass infection and sickness, are nevertheless strikingly characterized by a cautiously strengthening brightness.
The Artist
Dennis Kardon (b. 1950, Des Moines, Iowa – lives and works in New York) is a graduate of Yale University, took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and was a student of Chuck Close and Al Held. Pervaded with a sense of untouchable intimacy, Kardon’s canvases are “generously painterly, voluptuously creepy narrative pictures of familial conflict, sexual angst and infantile yearning”, as Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 2004.
For several decades, Dennis Kardon has been experimenting with painting’s ability to encompass the spectrum between abstraction and hyperreal representation. With an almost hallucinatory power, Kardon treats the surface of his canvases as a field with various properties of reflection or distortion, resulting in a narrative that seems to have been disrupted by an unexpected event. Kardon’s examination of the human figure digs into the psyche contradicting stereotypes and preformed ideas.
The artist’s whimsical tone serves to pervade his paintings with a discomforting feelingof familiarity: whatever you recognize is never exactly as you remember it to be. Critical comparisons have been made to David Lynch, for the ability to find the gothic in the every day, and to John Currin (who had a neighboring studio in the mid 90s). Ambiguity informs all the artist’s production: by playing with painting’s syntax and imaginatively re-contextualizing spontaneous painting from earlier stages, Kardon transforms each brushstroke into a possible signifier for something else. Thus, his paintings become a vehicle to examine how meaning is constructed, and allows viewers as partners in their creation. Kardon challenges painting’s potential by creating representational scenes that materialize from loose abstract brushstrokes. Moreover the endless intellectual challenge of Kardon’s practice has led him to counterbalance his painting with powerful writing and critical skills allowing him to become a highly respected contributor to several art publications.
Dennis Kardon has widely exhibited in the United States and beyond, and his work is part of public collection such as, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.