Space Without Spaceis the title of Shirley Kaneda's new show at
Galerie Richard. The fluctuating space in painting below,
Cheerful Desolation, is a small taste of her long term project to visualize what does not exist.
Here's an excerpt of an interview between
David Ryan and Shirley Kaneda from Ryan's book
Talking Painting, a great collection of thoughtful dialogues about contemporary abstraction.
DR: The recent work seems to explore a more overall, disruptive fragmentation, rather than the bi-partite differentiation, and it results in a kind of spatial disorientation, whereby one opening of form seems to fold onto another. Andrew Benjamin recently suggested a possible reading of the new work as a loss or lack of ‘ground’- and I’m reading him both literally and philosophically here - that your work, “eschews any necessity of retaining a determining ground.” SK: Yes, I think that’s accurate because they’re made up of parts, and they are, by and large, disparate elements. And yet they have to co-exist on the same picture plane, defying a figure/ ground reading even thought the figure/ ground might initially seem to be the ‘logic’ of the painting. My intention is to deny that rationality within the work. In a way it’s all ‘groundless’ - we are left simply a bunch of elements of their material and visual relations. It is these effects which supply the material for their interpretation. And those material relationships that exist in the real world are replicated in my work to make visible those relationships that exist, but cannot be seen.
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Shirley Kaneda, Cheerful Desolation , 2014
72 x 64 inches, acrylic and oil on linen |
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Installation view |
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Shirley Kaneda, Cheerful Desolation , 2014
72 x 64 inches, acrylic and oil on linen |