While action and energy are integral to both Frank Wimberley’s paintings at Spanierman Gallery and Claire and Daniel Schoenheimer’s photographs at the Crazy Monkey Gallery, the former offers physicality in a concrete sense, while in the case of the latter, it turns out to be surprisingly conceptual.
For Mr. Wimberley, featured here in what might be called a mini retrospective, titled “Physicality/Action,” the key components in his works have always been based on a dynamic joining of textures, brush strokes, and assertive rhythms that, in their amalgamation, manifest both the artist’s control of the medium and the spontaneity that arises from the process of painting itself.
Arriving at his images through a dense layering of colors and brush strokes that, in their juxtaposition of surface quality, veer from gently smooth to thick impasto applications, the artist further enhances his work by using elements of collage, often taken from previous works, that increase the pieces’ sense of corporeal existence.
At the same time, this marriage of techniques also serves to emphasize aspects of personal emotional experience, thereby creating a language of form that is transmitted in a manner that is highly evocative and thoroughly engaging.
But it is Mr. Wimberley’s comprehension of rhythmic construction that allows the paintings to transcend mere replications of the kind of action painting that defined the abstract expressionists from the 1950s onward, drawing on bebop jazz melodies that orchestrate the works in directions that are completely surprising without ever allowing the pieces to lose their sense of tonality or logical progression.
This achievement is notable throughout the exhibition, but is particularly successful in recent works such as “Accents Red” (acrylic on canvas, 2008) and “But Soft” (acrylic on canvas, 2007), each of which covers the entire canvas in pigment, while still managing to create a profound sense of meditative silence.
This silence is arrived at through the imposition of implied negative space in which subtle cadences of stillness are balanced by the sweeps of color and brushstrokes that powerfully orchestrate the compositional flow.
This effect is also apparent in paintings such as “Carborundum” (acrylic on canvas, 2006), in which the broad expanse of black in the upper segment of the work develops its own rhythms through horizontal streams of monochromatic paint that actually dominate the expressively vibrant white field in the lower portion of the painting.
This use of subtlety creates, as the writer Phyllis Braff once noted, the sensation of pushing “beneath the frontal plane, making vague, undefined spatial depth part of the experience.”
The exhibition of Frank Wimberley’s paintings at the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton, “Physicality/Action,” continues through August 18.
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