Dark Matter Catalog

The ethereal paintings of Ted Pim reference old master portraiture. He began his painting career creating mural-scale works in the dark recesses of abandoned breweries, factories and schools, places where few, if any, got the chance to experience the work. The distorted physiognomies rendered in ghostly tonalities emerge from a nearly black expanse to create a poetic, almost funereal imagery, channeling Goya and Francis Bacon.

Gabriel J. Shuldiner re-purposes the detritus of the world around us, bending, coaxing, twisting and forcing found and discarded objects and materials into a new existence. A pseudo-trademarked amalgam of black pigments called ‘postapocalypticBLACK™’ is Shuldiner’s secret ingredient in his alchemical process of turning base matter into a more precious substance. Despite the overriding insistence of the color black, the surfaces have a painterly quality, alternating between matte and sheen and sometimes injected with a tiny shock of fluorescent color. The works move between monolithic statements of form to more free-flowing, seemingly fragile elements.

Skill and serendipity are the hallmarks of Jack R. Slentz. Best known for his wooden sculpture, where single green hardwood blocks are chosen for their color, grain and imperfections. A violent tool like a chainsaw is used with scalpel precision and as the green wood dries, unplanned, but hoped for, changes occur as the grain shifts and cracks appear. A new and visually different body of work, the fetish-like forms of rubber, steel and occasionally wood, continues the combination of the expected and unexpected. Rubber inner tubes are introduced into the hand-forged steel armatures, manacles and wooden sculptural supports and then inflated.

The resultant shapes suggest the exaggerated biomorphic human form constrained and straining against the bondage of metal and wood.