Exhibition Details
September 15 to October 16, 2007
Jameson Ellis
The Atomic Sublime
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Jameson Ellis. In the past century a few artists in each generation have found a way to re-invent the formal language of abstraction to suit the concerns of the age. Jameson Ellis draws on a range of antecedents—Stella’s regular, mechanical surfaces, Gerhard Richter’s dragged and smeared canvases, Rothko’s fields of color, Bridget Riley’s repetitive optical effects—but in the end they look only like themselves. These are not just pleasing arrangements of color, nor are they inward–looking expressions of emotional states, instead they look outward at the world the clear-eyed perspective of history and raise questions about the future. Ellis makes innovative, ambitious work. He pushes at the bounds of the medium and strives for an abstract idiom relevant to our time.
Ellis looks to the dawn of the atomic age and the representative images of the era—jet contrails, mushrooms clouds, the rolling static of an early television set, aerial views of sprawling suburban developments, superhighways and cloverleaf interchanges—and distills these forms to the point of near total abstraction.
The form of the work supports its content. Ellis has developed a complex mechanical process to sweep color in smooth bands and jagged breaks across the painting’s surface. They have a stark, machined appearance and almost no trace of the hand. The palette is vibrant: pinks, yellows, aquas and other bright synthetic hues. They have a tremendous visual appeal but the tonalities are too hot to be mere eye-candy; these colors burn.
His aesthetic might be termed “The Atomic Sublime.” His subject is a quintessentially modern one: the awe of seeing certain immense, human-generated forces, those technologies which in their sheer scale and power compel us to search for new terms appropriate to the experience. Upon seeing the first successful atomic weapons tests, Robert Oppenheimer grasped for a way to express his awe and found it in the words of the Hindu deity Vishnu, “now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Portentous and terrifying but also lyrical, his words suggest that he sensed beauty as well as fear as he looked at the atomic cloud rising over the desert. This notion--that even something as frightening as a 10 megaton test blast can be beautiful if seen from a far enough distance--is the essence of the sublime and it is the core of Ellis’ aesthetic. His work provides a meditative space from which to consider and come to terms with the arbitrary forces and inhuman beauties that increasingly confront contemporary experience.
They are visually seductive but not in order to be merely decorative or to retreat from that which is difficult to look at. Ellis’s paintings operate through dissonance. Their purpose is to contain disquiet.
