| Co-curating the exhibition Persistence of Painting, Peter Franck and I try to highlight the skill, dedication and hands-on approach of four young artists, Jeremy Wagner, Karen Seapker, Noah Landfield, and Rachel Budde, along with their individuality, innate creativity and ability to communicate with a contemporary audience. With a provocative mix of abstract and representational elements, and references ranging from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism, Cubism, Color Field, and Pop Art, the selected works are all rooted in art history, yet vibrantly connected to the moment through references to film, digital photographic manipulation, and global communication. Initially, and from a distance, it is easy to mistake Wagner’s work for representational realism. But on closer inspection, layers of opacity and patches of raw, steel “canvas” and rust reveal pure geometric forms and fields of color. |  |
Douglas Lederman
Co-curating the exhibition Persistence of Painting, Peter Franck and I try to highlight the skill, dedication and hands-on approach of four young artists, Jeremy Wagner, Karen Seapker, Noah Landfield, and Rachel Budde, along with their individuality, innate creativity and ability to communicate with a contemporary audience. With a provocative mix of abstract and representational elements, and references ranging from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism, Cubism, Color Field, and Pop Art, the selected works are all rooted in art history, yet vibrantly connected to the moment through references to film, digital photographic manipulation, and global communication.
Initially, and from a distance, it is easy to mistake Wagner’s work for representational realism. But on closer inspection, layers of opacity and patches of raw, steel “canvas” and rust reveal pure geometric forms and fields of color. Rendered by a technically masterful painter, with his gritty urban imagery, unique materials, knowledge of, and teasing references to art history, Wagner’s work is truly contemporary and pertinent.
With swirling vortexes and sweeping marks, Seapker denotes movement, the passage of time, and the bursting of emotion with extraordinary skill and originality. Her figurative studies refer to prior styles of painting, yet their juxtaposition with near abstract, color-field backgrounds is strikingly contemporary, and her backgrounds are anything but static in the way that color-field canvases and much abstract art can be.
Landfield’s impressionistic overlays of metropolitan, architectural renderings express the tension between man-made, urban structures and the forces of nature, and the ways in which they manage to coexist. The unsettling nature of these temporal questions give a strong contemporary edge to Landfield’s work, as does his play with visual perception in the near-photographic quality of his depiction of cities, which are actually painted in a masterfully pointillist manner.
Budde, who studied miniature painting in India, combines fine brush strokes and intimate details with contemporary socio-economic, psychological, cosmological, and gender themes, along with unsettling and occasionally morbid imagery, endowing her work (in both her small- and large-scale paintings) with a unique visceral impact. She works predominantly in gouache on paper, with the additions of ink and metal leaf, again referring back to the tradition of Indian illustration, while communicating a strong and unquestionably contemporary sensibility.
