Like the outpouring of zombie cinema in recent years, formalism has been criticized for hovering between crass and unsophisticated, remaining impossibly flighty. Despite their outward simplicity, they both unveil uniquely visceral reactions and challenge the viewer’s understanding of humanity. Controversy has surrounded form since Plato’s discussion of its “inexplicable manner.” Clement Greenberg deduced formalism from Abstract Expressionism, the highest art of the 1960’s in his opinion, a self-contained aesthetic experience of this world but inimitable otherwise.
Formalism currently navigates through the minefields of an extremely commercialized scene. Structural language translates into repetition and single-mindedness, reducing Minimal work to unqualified low-art. Somehow formal work has been sacrificed, quarantined to summer homes in New Haven or doctor’s offices.
Formal: A Dirty Word? offersa renewed vigor in formalism in which aesthetic value is found outside the market’s prescriptions. Each work provides content that is its own context. Sean Micka’s work utilizes form as an instructional tool, a substance that reveals blurred nuances in a perceptual frenzy. He assures that abstraction and representation are actually “two sides of the same coin…two parts of the same problem.” Thomas Spoerndle explores the inverse meanings of symbols and shapes stocked in memory. Layered patterns taunt the mind’s ability to recognize meaning and encourage dissection of the individual components in addition to the whole. Andrew Havenhand battles the perimeters of formulaic painting in dilated spatial compositions. Decorative patterns and an intricate composition challenge the equality of the conglomerated parts in the midst of the whole, falling somewhere between “high” and “applied” arts.
The work retreats from realistic renditions of actual objects or people in favor of essences, unadulterated clarifications of the world. In order to engage his perceptual experience despite the influx of visual information, David E. Paterson advocates structural order, commanding precision to rid the viewer of superfluous data. He warps the macro into the micro, similar to Nicki Stager and her work with light and sensitive photo-paper. Utilizing secreted human oils, slivers of paper, slabs of meat, and much more, Stager tests light’s definition of line, shape, and form.
In finding inspiration outside of narrative confines, the work in the show appears subliminally transcendent. Kinga Czerska’s flattened planes are fluid, balanced patterns of undulation, connoting the moment when potential energy turns kinetic. Her work summons the denominators of life’s most consistent systems, from the psyche to the stars, engineering to the animal kingdom. Allie Rex’s exploding paper-installations delicately absorb the viewer in a surge of color and pattern. Her fragile works urge the viewer to think beyond the wall, finding solace in their familiarity and impetus toward expansion.
Formal: A Dirty Word? explores a range of formalist ideals, indicating a shift in content and contained context, and thus form. Formal criticism is also addressed in each piece, similarly quick to be judged as stale and robotic, an academic reject. The exhibition invigorates the ideas of formalism, form, and formal criticism in the grander market, implementing a new structure to a definitive niche.
