Charles Gibbons Paintings
CHARLES GIBBONS: DYNAMIC SPACE AND THE ART OF CONTEMPLATION by John Austin Charging his surfaces with a play of energetic physical releases Charles Gibbons compels us with his visual conundrums. His works assert the picture plane with their own sense of inviolatedness, each stroke of color and application of paint is autonomous one minute, yet the next minute a magical transformation appears. Each painting contains pure energy, undistilled sensation yet the force of these energetic fields yields another, casually superimposed correspondence. What is made crystal-clear in his artistic endeavorsis is that the artist is producing art which, while drawn out of private experience, reaches out in universal terms to touch everyone on different levels. Perhaps the most impressive quality that emerges out of each work is its lyrical drive which forms a visual choreography of parts related to wholes as well as voids as well as of subtle, nuanced coloristic tonalities connected in vitalistic ways to compositional shapes. The compelling drama of energized suspension pervades all of Gibbons’ artistic work. A measured sense of anticipation seems to arise spontaneously and naturally out of working process. This working style, so geared to the flows and ebbs of creative energies has been honed over time in order to exploit certain factors and conditions. The artist’s methodology favors the random, the elusive and chance occurrence working hand-in-hand with conscious deliberation. Much of the artist’s process-oriented work has a constructed look but it is a construction that seems tentative, filled with contingency. This process gracefully brings home the point that the universe, while seemingly stilled is yet unpredictable at its core, ready to change and alter its state of being from one moment to the next. In effect, the artist is deeply immersed in delineating for us, the viewers, what he perceives as an elemental condition of life, which finds its equilibrium through an interior force of counter-harmonies. The delicate compositional balance that pervades each piece suggests, then, a momentary state of quiet and stillness within flux. This suggestion of a temporary surcease from the strains of life is poetically filled with intimations of voids and silenced energies. It allows the artist to communicate a flurry of tensions and of struggle in his work. What seems quite evident in the artist’s efforts is his encapsulation of principal Taoist tenets of seeing into the nature of things through the nurturing of a sustained condition of “wu-wei “, or non-action. Lingering in its position it offers us a visual analogy of being psychically suspended between heaven and earth, hovering between oppositions and between differences, and thrust into what Martin Heidegger termed the “pure serenification” of the mystery of creation. In one passage, the philosopher Konrad Fiedler wrote: “The painter is not a person who sees in a more naturalistic, more poetic or more ecstatic more than other people. He is rather a person who also sees further with the hand, there where the eye gives out.” In looking closely at Gibbons’ work we are indeed swayed by the mysterious rightness of his coloration which animates his planes. But what gives us pause, what stops the eye and makes it marvel at the hand of the artists is his capacity to find that Archimedian point, acting as perceptual lever, which upends visual expectations. I am persuaded that the artist’s primary gift is his seemingly effortless capacity to allow the eye and mind to oscillate between their recognition of a world materialized and then, magically, de-materialized. This transformative effect, where materials assume another life beyond the prosaic is the hallmark of a great artist. It is artmaking’s ultimate prize: to recognize limits only to transcend them through the imaginative capacity. Charles Gibbons speaks eloquently and passionately through his delicate nuances in his work of the self’s journeys undertaken to arrive at a condition of centeredness.
John Austin is a writer living and working in Manhattan. 2
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 1, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 2, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 3, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 4, 2011, acrylic on canvas with Holographic additives, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 5, 2011, acrylic on canvas with interference paint, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 6, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 7, 2011, acrylic on canvas with dry pigments, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 8, 2011, acrylic on canvas with iridescent copper, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 9, 2011, acrylic on canvas with interference paint, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 10, 2011, acrylic on canvas with interference paint, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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BoxCar 11, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 26” x 26”
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Charles Gibbons Paintings
BoxCar 12, 2011, acrylic on canvas with interference paint, 26” x 26”
Charles Gibbons Paintings
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