AVERY FALKNER: IN A LANDSCAPE
By Peter Frank
The American sense of landscape is big, sprawling, enveloping. But it is not really empty. There is always a sense of potential event, surprise, curve in the road or rise in the terrain, even in the serest of deserts, vastest of shores, most unyielding of plains. American painting has long reflected this dramatic expanse, and expansive drama, and Avery Falkner’s work perpetuates that vision.
Indeed, Falkner’s painting, especially his latest, proposes an ongoing dialectic between space itself and the structure into which space devolves – a structure the human eye may impose upon it or that nature itself carves from it, but a structure nonetheless. Falkner achieves a distinctive breadth and rhythm, builds it carefully even as he extracts it, as it were, out of thin air. Such breadth and rhythm have a strong precedent, in the painting of Wyeth, Hopper, and Remington, but more directly (because more abstractly) in the work of Willem De Kooning, John Hultberg, Stuart Davis, and Arthur Dove.
In Falkner’s own painting, as in that of his abstract predecessors, figures struggle to define themselves against their ground and do so only partially. What asserts itself in his work is not the counterplay of shapes so much as the definition of the space in which that play takes place. Forms conspire to define nearness and recession, allowing us to locate ourselves within what otherwise would be a void as infinite as the heavens. Those forms derive their textures and colors from the natural vibrancy of the spaces they articulate, but they mark what would otherwise be one tabula rasa after another, devoid of even as fundamental a mark as a horizon line. Occasionally Falkner will bring in an anchoring horizontal, but far more often he’ll ease in, or tease in, our perception with so many notations – square, oval, pointed, curvilinear – that can complicate a visual field or open it up as if a curtain were drawing back, revealing a cinematic (that is, reflective and screenlike) rather than theatrical depth. Something about Falkner’s manner of applying paint, or the very grit of his medium, hones our sense of the canvas’s surface, and we see his compositions assuming coherence on a flat plane.
But ultimately we see each composition and its elements open up the painting’s surface, prompting the picture to describe an inhabitable – if only arguably hospitable – place. Avery Falkner’s search for spatial veracity begins and ends at the picture plane, but in between it travels as deep as it can, which is at least as deep as our eyes will let it.
Los Angeles
June 2014
By Peter Frank
The American sense of landscape is big, sprawling, enveloping. But it is not really empty. There is always a sense of potential event, surprise, curve in the road or rise in the terrain, even in the serest of deserts, vastest of shores, most unyielding of plains. American painting has long reflected this dramatic expanse, and expansive drama, and Avery Falkner’s work perpetuates that vision.
Indeed, Falkner’s painting, especially his latest, proposes an ongoing dialectic between space itself and the structure into which space devolves – a structure the human eye may impose upon it or that nature itself carves from it, but a structure nonetheless. Falkner achieves a distinctive breadth and rhythm, builds it carefully even as he extracts it, as it were, out of thin air. Such breadth and rhythm have a strong precedent, in the painting of Wyeth, Hopper, and Remington, but more directly (because more abstractly) in the work of Willem De Kooning, John Hultberg, Stuart Davis, and Arthur Dove.
In Falkner’s own painting, as in that of his abstract predecessors, figures struggle to define themselves against their ground and do so only partially. What asserts itself in his work is not the counterplay of shapes so much as the definition of the space in which that play takes place. Forms conspire to define nearness and recession, allowing us to locate ourselves within what otherwise would be a void as infinite as the heavens. Those forms derive their textures and colors from the natural vibrancy of the spaces they articulate, but they mark what would otherwise be one tabula rasa after another, devoid of even as fundamental a mark as a horizon line. Occasionally Falkner will bring in an anchoring horizontal, but far more often he’ll ease in, or tease in, our perception with so many notations – square, oval, pointed, curvilinear – that can complicate a visual field or open it up as if a curtain were drawing back, revealing a cinematic (that is, reflective and screenlike) rather than theatrical depth. Something about Falkner’s manner of applying paint, or the very grit of his medium, hones our sense of the canvas’s surface, and we see his compositions assuming coherence on a flat plane.
But ultimately we see each composition and its elements open up the painting’s surface, prompting the picture to describe an inhabitable – if only arguably hospitable – place. Avery Falkner’s search for spatial veracity begins and ends at the picture plane, but in between it travels as deep as it can, which is at least as deep as our eyes will let it.
Los Angeles
June 2014