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Dana Gordon in Paris – New Abstract Painting from New York

Sep 20, 2018

Dana Gordon's elegant, powerful new work sings beautifully in its refined setting in Paris's Galerie Metanoia, on rue Quincampoix in the Beaubourg neighborhood. "Lucky Paris" is the response from David Cohen -- art critic, and editor and publisher of Artcritical.com -- to the video of this exhibition.

Gordon, a veteran of the New York scene, has produced in this body of work what could be said to be a comprehensive distillation of his decades of exploration of the expressive potential of pure line, color, and form and their interaction. That is, his distillation of abstract painting. It is clear that these paintings make the case that neither abstract painting, nor “modernism”, is a period style, and that abstraction in art derives from all historical forms of art, but also underlies them.

At one point in his career, in the mid-1970s, Gordon decided to start over and deliberately explore the potential of mark-making and line from its most basic. Quickly it became clear that the field of color form that encompasses any canvas must be taken into consideration as well. The balance between pure structure and unfettered expression has taken many states of being in the long history of his work.

Dana Gordon - On the Uptake. 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 150x120 cm. © Dana Gordon

In the show in Paris (through September 28), Gordon's paintings are all divided into two equal color areas vertically. Some of the paintings are horizontal in proportion, some vertical, an example of simple differences Gordon uses that are both stark and subtle, and produce complex perceptual results. Gordon then draws a complicated, seemingly free but highly considered tracing of line over each color area. One side has one pattern of line, the other side another. However, the sides are subtly linked not only by the way the lines are drawn but by a clear play with the colors. Both line and color have a strong kick in these works, as if Pollock joined up with Rothko in them. Indeed, these works seem to contend that the last great art was produced by their generation. They certainly eschew any of the literary addition to art or conceptual reduction popular in recent decades. But Gordon's roots encompass the history of all human art. Asked for his favorite artists, he is likely to say Giotto first. And Gordon is based not just in the Western tradition, as one can readily see the precedence of classic Chinese Zen painting in the daring flow of Gordon's line. “I want the line to express as much content and feeling as efficiently as possible,” he has said.

Gordon's work implies that abstract expressionism itself is also not a period style, but a statement that painting on a flat rectangular canvas became established over many centuries for the basic reason that it provided for the most intense and deep universal power of purely visual expression. Gordon is among the artists who, especially in New York, have maintained this approach for many years and both underlie and participate in the recent burgeoning of abstract painting in that city and now elsewhere.

Ideelart is happy to point out that Dana Gordon is one of the artists we represent.

Featured image: Dana Gordon - Unknown Unknowns. 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 120x150 cm. © Dana Gordon