Aaron Fink: Sail On

AARON FINK

SAIL ON

Plate of Peaches, 2009, oil on linen, 36x50 inches, (detail)/ Cover: Magnolia, 2010, oil on canvas, 30x40 inches, (detail)

Aaron Fink: Sail On

May 21 - June 14 Opening Reception Saturday, May 21 3pm - 5pm

Alpha Gallery 37 Newbury St Boston, MA 02116 617-536-4465 / alphagallery.com

Lotus, 2011, oil on panel, 30x40 inches (detail)

Aaron Fink New Work/New World

By Patricia G. Berman If a honeybee could paint, if it could express how overwhelmingly monumental the world appeared in relation to its tiny body, if it could somehow capture the dynamic complexity of color and texture as registered by the thousands of cells in its compound eyes, its work might look a little like Aaron Fink’s new paintings.

Objects, from cheeseburgers to magnolia blossoms, assume a hyper monumentality, looming large in their isolating, rectangular environments. The thick contours of these hypertrophic objects vibrate with traces of paint from the backgrounds that comb through them, and from color dragged from their luscious centers that explode outward.

Fink’s surfaces -- thick with paint trowelled on, scraped, smoothed wet-on-wet, squeegeed, and frottaged into foamy peaks -- are peeled or stripped away, revealing layer upon layer of color and form. Fore- and backgrounds merge in unexpected ways as the animated paint layers blend and unfold.

Cappuccino, 2011, oil on panel, 11x14 inches (detail)

Paradoxically, the closer the objects appear, through their massive scale, the less familiar they become, and the harder they are to see as integrated objects amidst their cascading layers of paint. The honeybee cannot, of course, manage the herculean task of such lyrical painting. Yet the course of that insect’s eccentric, swooping flight, and the effect of its many eyes, each registering a different plane and perspective, offer a metaphor for the ways in which Aaron Fink sees, freshly and from manifold perspectives. His subjects swell sculpturally in space, and space itself becomes a strangely materialized and navigable substance.

Aaron Fink has for years meditated on vernacular objects, granting them monumental presence through his close-up attentiveness and his deployment of animated painting techniques. Often, his subjects, such as hats, fruit, or flowers, are also lifted from old master paintings. In the current body of work, a spotted orchid and a sequence of magnolia blossoms are reminiscent of Frederick Edwin Church’s recordings of floral exotica, only now rendered fluid and tumescent.

Spotted Orchid, 2010, oil on linen, 60x48 inches

Blueberry Pie, 2010, oil on panel, 18x24 inches

Popcorn (2010) and Popcorn (Holbein), from 2011, anthropomorphize, and render strange, the normally cheerful little fluffy new world food. The normally banal kernel of corn, exploded from within, appears in Popcorn to transmute into skull-like nodes, their contours sculpturally defined by black contour lines. It is evidence of the artist looking so hard and so long at a kernel of popcorn that he has discovered within it an associational link with Hans Holbein’s freakily elusive anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors (1533).

In acts of perception acute enough to be rendered by a bee and recorded by brushes laden by both luscious paint and by history, Aaron Fink makes the familiar enticing, intimate, and otherworldly.

Patrica G. Berman is a Boston-based writer, art critic and professor of art history at Wellesley College and the University of Olso, Norway.

Popcorn (Holbein), 2011, oil on linen, 50x36 inches

Popcorn (Holbein) offers a further uncanny meditation on this tiny consumable in which the kernel, in its roseate and venous fleshiness, becomes humanoid.

A meeting of Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cast (1895) and Francis Bacon’s Painting (1946), the popped corn is animated both through Fink’s erudite art-historical references and his magisterial movement of paint. Blown up to three feet by over four feet in size, the evanescent popcorn kernel has become a memento mori. Its organic form is punctuated by a gestural grid and bracketed by arenas of color that articulate both a low-lying horizon and an opening into a deep blue vista, both microscopic and cosmic. A blueberry pie, resting on a Matisse-like patterned ground, becomes apocalyptic. An ice cream cone becomes an agent of the sublime, its massive volcanic form dissipating into darkness.

Popcorn, 2010, oil on linen, 40x50 inches

Hot Magnolia, 2011, oil on panel, 11x14 inches (detail)

Italian Loaf, 2010, oil on linen, 36x72 inches

Cheeseburger, 2011, oil on panel, 16x20 inches

Profiteroles, 2011, oil on panel, 18x24 inches

Vanilla, 2011, oil on panel, 20x16 inches

Magnolia, 2011, oil on linen 60x84 inches

Blue Magnolia, 2011, oil on panel, 36x48 inches

Aaron Fink (Born in Boston, 1955) Selected Museum Collections

Arizon State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Arthur J. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, TX Aspen Institute, Aspen, CO Boston Public Library, Boston, MA Bouwfonds Nederlandse Gemeenten, Netherlands Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA Danish House of Parliament, Copenhagen, Denmark Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO Farnsworth Museum, Farnsworth, ME Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Fedrick Weisman Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN Library of Congress, Washington, DC Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC New York Public Library, New York, NY Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, FL Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR Samuel P. Harn Museum, Gainesville, FL Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM Sundance Institute, Provo, UT Tufts University, Medford, MA University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

Monograph

Aaron Fink: Out of the Ordinary (Hard Press Editions) text: Eleanor Heartney 230 pages, 203 color illustrations

Education

Yale University, School of Art and Architecture, MFA 1979 Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore BFA 1977

White Magnolia, 2011, oil on panel, 16x20 inches

Apple Pie, 2009, oil on linen, 36x50 inches

Alpha Gallery 37 Newbury St Boston, MA 02116 617-536-4465 alphagallery.com

Content Š 2011 Aaron Fink, Alpha Gallery and Patricia G. Berman Catalog design by Nathaniel Fink