Wayne Gonzales
Crowd
2014
Portfolio of 5 copper plate etchings printed on Hahnemühle 300 gr
This suite of prints comes in a linen box
45.7 × 35.55 cm each (with an image size of 20.3 × 20.3 cm)
Edition of 40 copies, signed and numbered by the artist
Out of stock
about this work
A painter working with figuration and abstraction, deploying graphic strategies rooted in photography and print media, Wayne Gonzales’s complex artistic practice has spanned over twenty-five years.
Though they are visually inviting, his paintings remain open and elusive, characterised by layered subject matter and a sharp worldview, with political themes lurking beneath their meticulous surfaces.
Crowd, a new series of five copperplate etchings, expresses Gonzales’s ongoing fascination with the theme of our culture’s indeterminate mass. These prints show a group of houses (inspired by a Walker Evans photograph from the 1936 series American Photographs), a group of people bathing, parked cars, groups of people sitting and standing at the edge of a forest, perhaps waiting for a concert, a meeting, or a picnic. As with Gonzales’s large scale paintings, these images leave the viewer with more questions than answers. Technically, they are a series of landscapes, however these pictures seem to have been jarringly pried loose from genre and their original contexts—less appropriated than re-authored. In their detached state of beauty, this work suggests a burnished and weary reportage on our collective state of being. For this series of etchings—the artist’s first in over XX years, he applied scratches and cross-hatching directly to the copper plates to provide a diffused sense of light and dark, which paradoxically seems to add detail to the images. The portfolio’s five works take on a surprising and dynamic unity, despite the disparate content seen in each individual “frame.”
about Wayne Gonzales
Wayne Gonzales’ painstakingly rendered paintings employ a rigorous formal structure to explore the relationship between photography and communal memory. His works begin with imagery from newspapers, magazines, the Internet, his own photography or that of iconic American modernists such as Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler. Emulating a photographer conducting post-production, Gonzales approaches the composition of his paintings by using digital technology to crop, edit and manipulate his source imagery. Often confined to a palette of sepia tones or hazy shades redolent of lens flare, the finished works highlight the mechanical and ephemeral feel of their sources.
Whilst the genesis of his paintings bears common ground with the photography-based political works of Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, Gonzales insists on a shift in the perception of photographic truth. Using a distinctive crosshatching technique centred on the effects of chiaroscuro, he models form through differing densities of interlocking brush strokes to create seductive effects of light and shade. Whilst this method offers visual clarity when viewed from afar, his paintings dissolve into an abstract assemblage of interlocking lines when seen up close, recalling pixelation. By emphasising the incidental and malleable aspects of photography, Gonzales’ works call into question the accuracy and reliability associated with reportage and formal documentation.
(courtesy of Stephen Friedman)
Notable solo exhibitions include Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; May 68 Gallery, New York ; Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; and CAC Malága, Malága,
Gonzales’ works are included in prominent international collections including Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Microsoft Art Collection, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Palm Springs Art Museum, California and Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy.
Wayne Gonzales is represented by the following gallery;
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Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans
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