| David Kastner’s work is vast and varied. Working both three-dimensionally and two-dimensionally, his ouevre boasts several bodies of work. Liquid Expresssions, a series of images of swirling, vibrant colors that expand from the painting surfaces onto the image frames, explores what he describes as a “sense of immediacy of expression [that] imitate the phenomena of nature. |  |
Jill Smith
Multi-media artist, David Kastner’s work was on view in an exhibition entitled Free Art Now at Ico Gallery in April.
David Kastner’s work is vast and varied. Working both three-dimensionally and two-dimensionally, his ouevre boasts several bodies of work.
Liquid Expresssions, a series of images of swirling, vibrant colors that expand from the painting surfaces onto the image frames, explores what he describes as a “sense of immediacy of expression [that] imitate the phenomena of nature.” In these works, he exploits the viscosity of the paint and its low and drying potential in combination with various solvents. Grounded on elaborate underpaintings, he employs his media carefully to achieve an intentionally subtle and mesmerizing crackling effect on the surface. While often compared to Abstract Expressionist works or Damien Hirst’s “Explosion” screenprints, these works are not so much related to such formal investigations, as to an attempt to mimic nature and the physics and chemistry of the paint itself.
Similarly, his popular sculptural relief works investigate the natural properties of shape, form, and color as well as text. Of note in these series, are Telepath, a gold box within which, a gold moth shape has been mounted. “Telepath” is written in gold above. Tolerence of Incomprehensibility depicts a crimson skeleton sculpture inside an equally as red box hung on the wall like a religious icon. His Mondrian-esque wood cut-outs similarly examine issues of color juxtapositioning as well as the relationships between shape and form. According to Kastner, this series is meant to encourage us to discontinue our search for meaning in the external world, and instead looking inside of ourselves for the answers. Such works also seem to speak to issues of mortality, spirituality, and the passions of life and death. Untitled Sculpture, a large freestanding piece, centrally located in the exhibition resembles a cross between a totem-pole like structure and a large set of colorful and stacked children’s building blocks, represents the natural progression from the relief works to standalone sculpture.
Most exciting, however, is Kaster’s newest body of work, a series of rectangular and triangular shaped fir frames within which he has stretched a variety of colorful embroidery strings. Reminiscent of Lyrical or Pop Abstraction, and Color Field painting of the 60s and 70s, Kastner’s work contemporizes these aesthetics through his subtle reinterpretation of art historical and contemporary cultural references. Using a fresh and modern palette, the artist investigates the mechanics of Michel Chevreul’s theory of “simultaneous contrast.”
A late 19th century French chemist whose research led to early applications in the arts, Chevreul developed the theory of simultaneous contrast while directing the dye works at a Parisian carpet manufacturing company. While there, he received many complaints about the dyes being used, specifically that the blacks appeared different when used next to blues. As the supervisor of the preparation of the dyes, it occurred to him that the main problem had nothing to do with pigmentation and chemistry, but were instead related to optics. He determined that the yarn’s perceived color was influenced by other surrounding yarns. After having executed further scientific investigations, he published his De la loi du contrast simultané des couleurs, a comprehensive attempt at providing a systematic basis to seeing colors. The work dealt with the “simultaneous contrast” of colors, and his famous law: “two adjacent colors, when seen by the eye, will appear as dissimilar as possible.” His studies became popular among classic painters of his day in their attempts to reproduce nature as closely as possible, by helping them to realize the difference between the effects of light and chiarascuro from those of color contrast. Even so, his color principles eventually became even more influential to the emerging modernist movements of Neo-Impressionism and Orphism. Today Kastner astutely employs these effects in his dinstinctly Postmodern aesthetic.
Suspended in adjacent lines, either vertically or at crosshatched angles, each colored thread occupies a color location that resides in juxtaposition with the color of each thread beside it. The result is the harmonic resonance and harmony created as light bounces off of these richly hued fibers. Some of these works are backed by crackled white surfaces, while the most successful ones are backed by mirrors that work to reflect light even more powerfully. Employing the physics of multi-dimensional layering, Kastner deftly produces works that play on the illusory perception of color space, rendering color fields—phenomena that he likens to “color auras”—that radiate and glow off the surface of the artworks, and that morph and pulsate as one moves around them. Visually-stimulating and intellectually satisfying, these works are quite compelling. Like Kandinsky and Ozenfant before him, these works transform color theory from the realm of mere physics, rendering it as something living, breathing, and even spiritual.
David Kastners exhibition Free Art Tomorrow was on show at the Ico Art & Music Gallery, NYC
