Laumont Statement | frankgillette

Statement for the Laumont Editions Show

Within the pitch-&-toss of post modern attitudes and subsequent practice, digital graphics software appears to be emerging as the ne plus ultra methodology for a novel mixing of pictorial codes. It is this assumption which corralled my flexible interests while focusing attention upon the spectrum of possibilities opened-up by such a protean medium.

Drawing together a cascade of polysemous ingredients into common pictorial venues was and remains the initial spur which provoked the fifteen compositions in the show. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”, thus a wobbly balance of combinatory visual prosody linked with both risible and grave content is an essential characteristic of intent driving the work.

An additional corresponding element of intent is the entire issue of diametrical opposition implicate in pictorial structure. Calculated ambiguities are the result. These results, in their turn, generate various types of pictorial ambiguity within which a range of sub-sets come into a blizzard of play. Spacially sliced interactions between disparate constituent parts match juxtapositions of divergent association. And these contrary associations simultaneously meld into and reflect the pictorial structure itself.

Saltatory shifts, multivalenced resonances, and blatant contradictions pivot and spin amidst a somehow recognizable but scrambled hornet’s nest of anomalous connections. And this dicey nest culminates in a simple consonant point: myriad internal paradoxes resolve in the potent and peculiar exclusivity of pictorial coalescence; of elements divergent becoming convergent through an elixir governed by paradoxical attraction. Refractory and mischievous riddles thus acquire a distinct emotional tone, a quality of cognitive dissonance, an etherealized though melancholic buoyancy which arrives at inscrutable “solutions” finally defining the pictures themselves; in terms which are unique to themselves, Ding an sich.

Perhaps more simply put: these are pictures which address and embrace a fictive realm, a mise en sens, encouraging the experience of optical or visual or perceptual ambiguity. They are intended to invite a viewer into the experience of unfamiliar pictorial space, populated with quasi-familiar entities, visages, and/or convergences. Moreover, their intent flirts with the influence of Agon. That is, their modus operandi consciously appropriates a selective range of historical sources, references, and methods; while their appointments engage and manipulate previous structural and iconographic modalities.

Frank Gillette

Feburary 1999 / NYC