My show "Test Patterns" opens Oct 3rd at there-there, 6-9pm. Show runs Oct 3rd through Oct 31st, 2019.
there-there is pleased to present Test Patterns, an exhibition of process-driven abstract painting by Los Angeles based artist Fritz Chesnut.
Chesnut’s newest body of work continues the evolution of his preoccupation with abstraction and its inherent tensions with acts of representation. Forms are conjured by heat, weight and tactility of the paint in and of itself. The surfaces are dynamic and distorted creating a kind of cartographic language, breaking with the grid. With this work, experimental geometries swell and warp.
Inspirations can be seen in nature and in the environmental crisis. The fields are ridden with webs, trails and patterns. His topographical gestures are organic and automatic. Some works conjure the cosmos.
His minimal palette is often inspired by everything from punk zines and flyers to Warhol. His gestures include pouring, spraying, stenciling, printing and sanding.
These works are produced using screens, netting, fencing and industrial materials. By both stenciling and literally pressing the screen into paint, patterns appear and are distorted by gravity and water. In other paintings, trowels are used to form striated lines. Chesnut is interested in the movement of the works - appearing to be in an ambivalent state of formation or dissolution.
He employs spray paint, through and across the surface of the painting, and in some instances lifts and moves the skin of the sprayed paint with water, enabling it to float and disperse.
The artist reveals, “The main event taking place is the interplay of materials, of oil and water producing a dance of resistance and cooperation. Everything settles into place”.
Fritz is interested in the duality of the structure of the hybridic paintings. Sometimes the work appears to mimic the photographic through play with depiction, dimension, image, space and surface. He sees the work structurally akin to the process by which geological evolution creates patterns or fractals in the earth’s surface.
Fritz Chesnut was born in 1973 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995 and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 1997. He has had solo exhibitions at c. nichols project, (Los Angeles), Country Club, (Los Angeles and Cincinnati), CULT/Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, (San Francisco) and Bellwether Gallery, (New York). His work has been seen in such venues as LAXART, Los Angeles, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, Pepin-Moore, Los Angeles, White Columns, New York, The Bronx Museum, New York, and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, among many others.
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