Geometric Elegance Essay

Geometric Elegance: Art in the Age of Computational Beauty

Geometric abstraction has a long history reaching all the way back to early modernism and beyond. No one can say if contemporary geometric art has its origins in Constructivism, De Stijl, Synchromism, Suprematism, or Synthetic Cubism because they were all harbingers of a growing fascination with architectonic elements in art. It can be argued that the rigid contours of Futurism, the mechanical method of Pointillism, or the way that the Divisionist’s sectioned off space were just as influential to the development of geometric art as any of the other early movements of early modernism. Even the designs of the Bauhaus exerted a decisive influence on what would amount to thinking about the picture plane in a flat, and often, unmodulated manner. Art Informal, Art Concrete and even the Hard Edge painters of Southern California all raised the idea of using mathematical presuppositions to rigor their compositions, but tended to rely on reductive means and a rather polemic version of Platonism in order to defend the different ways they incorporated geometric elements into their avant-garde programs.

And yet, a single vector line, the vibration created between two juxtaposed hues, and the experience of geometric forms as kind of blueprint for the manifest world tended to rely on a hidden idea that many of these groups secretly held in common, and that was the notion of elegant design. Of course, the idea of elegance has been saddled with metaphysical implications from science, perhaps more than any other discipline. An elegant formula was long considered to have a better chance of being a correct than a convoluted proof. Elegance was equally married to the experience of beauty and allure as well, even when the description of these qualities relied on rhetorical claims about the ineffable, the indefinable and the presupposition of a disinterested gaze. Thus, the spurious nature of the kinds of claims that were regularly made on behalf of the experience of elegance lead a great number artists to investigate it constitute components down to the very substratum of line, plane and form, i.e., the geometric dispositif.

We see this most clearly with figures like Mondrian, who was a Theosophist and looked for the universality of geometry behind all things and tried to replicate these kinds of insights in his own work. Malevich was more of a utopianist, and considered himself to be a doctor of culture, claiming that he had the unique ability to diagnose the problems of aesthetic perception as well as the political ills of society by way of the mathematical purity of his deductions. Max Bill was a metaphysician of the new Concretism in art in much the same way that Lorser Feitelson courted spoke of eternal forms as an Abstract Classicist, but the aesthetics that they proposed still had enough of a family resemblance to be considered part of the teleological movement proposed by Greenberg toward an ever flatter treatment of the picture plane. After all, for Greenberg, Rosenberg and Steinberg, or the “culturebergs” as they were called at the height of modernism, the emergence of geometric abstraction was one part of the movement of art toward defining the limits of the medium, with the other being gestural abstraction. This of course, had to do with an assessment of historical tendencies rather than specifics, of ideological claims rather than individual desires and of political conscription rather than aesthetic experience existing in and for-itself. Contra Kant, the use of the geometric seemed to be anything but disinterested or reflective by the conclusion of the twentieth century, even though it took Neo-Geo’s lead proponent, Peter Halley, to underscore this fact in his canonical collection essays from the late eighties.

Even with all of these interventions about the uses and abuses of geometric motifs in art, many people still think of the architectonic as a rational, controlled and “cool” aesthetic that will always stand in opposition to the emotive, expressive and hot intensity of Action Painting. But as fractal geometries, virtual realities (VR) and advanced computation models spread throughout our culture, older movements like Op-Art, Minimalism and Neo-Concretism have suddenly begun to look more and more conservative with each passing year. And yet, the desert in Arizona has always provided the dynamism of a landscape made up of curvilinear canyons and crescent-shaped sand dunes; of long lines of highway stretched out against the infinite expanse of the horizon; and of the profound clarity provided for by the midday heat butting up against the concrete designs of sprawl and urbanity.

If life could be contained in geometric contours, than the very best example of it might have been in Arizona where the experimental site of Bio-dome — a geometric habitat for humans —mixed the aesthetics of science fiction with sustainable modular living in an effort to explore the idea of living life on other planets sometime in the far-flung future. So, we have to ask, if Geometric art has spread throughout the world during the twentieth century and even projected itself into futures unknown, then what does it mean that geometric art has also found a home here in the Valley of the Sun, and that it is experiencing something of a renaissance as a genre at this time?

The answer to this question isn’t at all simple, because each of the artistic producers in this show mobilizes the geometric in service of different ends, and many have been at it for a few decades or more. The recognition of these kinds of individual and group accomplishments, beyond the cosmopolitan debates that are often held at the various “centers” of the artworld, can be incredibly slow in assessing radically new developments on the periphery. Even with this being the case, it should in no way detour us from entertaining the proposition that Arizona may very well have a wave of geometric artists work in the Valley who are of the quality and caliber of any canonized group of abstract painters working in the field today, and that the contributions of the artists in Geometric Elegance: Art in the Age of Computational Beauty bares this out upon close examination. Thus, let us treat each project with a specificity and an intimacy that is complimented by the long-term dedication and sophistication that allows for Arizona to be seen as a significant place in the international discussion around geometric abstraction today.

James Angel

For James Angel, using geometric motifs is part and parcel of mixing the virtual and the real, where patterns, computational effects and a bricolage aesthetic actively mingle the rectilinear with the naturalistic. There is no set of programmatic restrictions in Angel’s work about the deployment of the geometric alongside other signs and symbols, rather, it is used in tandem with pixels and polygons to create a new synthesis that exists by way of merging different pictorial worlds.

If anything, we can say that the geometric is not used to downplay the organic in Angel’s oeuvre, because strong lines, graphic statements and even process-based strategies function as a framework that allows for the interaction of disparate visual elements. In this way, geometric motifs in Angel’s work can function as a background, a system or a structure — or even as a motivated gesture — giving his adoption of hard-edge painting a truly duplicitous function that few artists can bring together in such a seamless and inspired manner.

Thus, Angel is the kind of painter for whom strict dichotomies need not apply, because his investigations into the picture plane take precedence over and against the kinds of idealized rules and pedantic formulas that have beset a great deal of geometric painting in the past. In this way, Angel’s open program allows for his work to court a new sense of wonder, to engage with the mysterious and to embrace the surreal without any sense of constraint or reserve. Instead, idiosyncratic synchronicities, a new playfulness, and even pure serendipity make Angel’s cartographic compositions an important part of the discussion around the new geometricism.

Rowan Burkam

Rowan Burkam has a working program as an artist that embraces the perceptual and phenomenological aspects of engaging with geometric motifs. His installations often involve the play of parallax effects as a metaphor for thinking subject-object relations anew. Rather than reduce geometric elements to a static instance of design aesthetics, Burkam openly courts the expression of visual dynamism as a mode of integral experience that incorporates the spectator into the motion attributed to affect and geometry.

Tracking coordinates, a shift in personal perspective and the dissonance provided for by objects coming together in uncommon and uncanny ways is part of how Burkam uses art to highlight the situated nature of aesthetic experience, including the vicissitudes of how the geometry interacts with the perception accorded to bipedal locomotion. In this way, we are always implicated as a viewer in choosing, selecting, and even motivating the sense of visual activity accorded to Burkam’s projects, as well as the questions that emerge from an aesthetics of the encounter.

In his latest series of works each title is a reference to the many places that the pieces have traveled in the past as well as where they each currently reside, adding yet another dimension to how we think about triangulating space and place as corporeal beings, consumers of experience, and inhabitants of the world. These kinds of critical interventions mark Burkam’s oeuvre as being at the very forefront of discussions about art and the superimposition of perceptual, political and personal modes of engaging with the geometric as a verb rather than a stable entity.

Jeff Davis

Jeff Davis is working at the very forefront of the intersection of art and technology today. He uses algorithmic processes to create abstract imagery where the creative act is associated just as much with a final selection of projected outcomes as it is on writing custom software that generates each new cache of potential artworks. His oeuvre is often associated with the “digital turn” in abstract art which expanded the horizon of formalism over the last few decades by incorporating the prospects offered by digitization, different editing programs and the rise of virtual worlds.

This shows itself in Davis’s different series through the diverse ways that his images are meditated, allowing him to manipulate the elements of size, quantity, color, placement, and grid density within rigorously bounded parameters. In this way, his work not only capitalizes on the crisp and clean aesthetic associated with the history of geometric art, but it also expands the possibilities for working in series with a greater degree computational specificity. By bringing together technological iterations and the widest possible variety of formalist variations, Davis is able to generate an aesthetic that resonates with contemporary concerns about the future of creativity and techno-science while developing an entirely new model for visual poetics.

On par with the most advanced forms of new media art, net art, and digital art being produced anywhere in the world, Davis has also made a significant contribution our understanding of form and color in his two books, the Foundations of Design and the Foundations of Color. Like Joseph Albers, Hans Hofmann’s and Bridget Riley’s teaching before him, Davis has updated the discussion around different modalities of perception, positing the use of geometric as the motif par excellence for exploring advanced theories of phenomenological complexity.

Peter Deise

Peter Deise has evolved an impeccable aesthetic sensibility that’s equal parts chaos and control. Developed over decades as a master craftsman, Deise has a reputation for achieving an exquisite sense of monumentality and a level of sophistication in execution that puts his work on par with the best sculptors working in the world today. Large or small, monochrome or polychrome, Deise’s vision casts the landscape around it in relief through the use of positive and negative shapes that are sure to grab your attention and never let go.

Hard geometric lines act as a counterpoint to the flowing organic forms that have become hallmark elements in Deise’s numerous projects. Equally comfortable making big public works or displaying the crisp clean lines of his sculptures in any exhibition hall, the impact is the same — simply stunning. The pure elegance of concave and convex curves submerged within the kinds of finishes that reflect the world around his pieces creates an effect that is hard to communicate, but it most certainly evokes a degree of communion with art lovers and casual spectators that is rare in the field of sculpture today. People don’t merely happen upon a Deise in the landscape, but rather, they have an encounter with it.

Part hand-hewn torqued steel, part neo-baroque swirls and spirals, one feels that each new piece is nothing less than a throw of the dice aimed at surmounting the play of serendipitous and idiosyncratic forms. Thus, Deise is one of the few artists in the early twenty-first century who can still create a non-objective sense of narrative by means of using abstract geometries alone, where the denouement of expressivity rests upon the entire three act structure of base, bulk and bold articulations that give us the image of sublimity unbound.

Leenie Engel

Leenie Engel has an aesthetic that mixes day-glow colors with the strategies of Op-Art and Alber’s measured sense of reductive and relative color values. Often composed of a single square color set against a vibratory background as a visual foil, we find that the use of high-end fabrication materials like car clear-coat and cold rolled steel give Engel’s pieces a sculptural quality matched with a painterly punch — create nothing short of stunning visual statements.

To see oneself reflected in the surfaces of Engel’s works creates a doubly active field of color and refrain, of presence and absence, of the central experience of viewing submerged within a field of chromatic activity that mirrors the world around it. The shear intensity of these pristine surfaces collides with the immensity of the environment, leaving one to inhabit a sonorous color field that exists not just in the mind’s eye, but also as an after-effect of retinal overload and the pleasures accorded to immersive aesthetics. A self-described design junky, a masterful sculpture and also an accomplished figurative artist, Engel makes a powerful debut in the idiom of abstraction with her “Colorbox” series, which is sure to have a bold and lasting impact on the next wave of rigorously fabricated, and beautifully articulated geometric art.

Lori Fenn

Lori Fenn has long been respected as having one of the most instantaneously recognizable aesthetics in the Valley. Dazzling color, pop iconography, and geometric abstraction all intersect with one another on her perfectly finished substrates. Fenn’s use of color tends to unfold in mandala like sequences, drawing one into a hypnotic aesthetic experience that is equal parts pleasure and fascination.

Both seductive and reductive, Fenn is able to accomplish something that is rare in the fine art world today, which is the ability to elicit a feeling of visual opulence but within strictly designed configurations and an even stricter dedication to craft. Toward this end, her aesthetic is one that has been refined to the point of perfection, with color unfolding in time like the perfect pitch of scale in music. Symphonic harmonies emerge as though they were unfolding in fractal-like patterns, where we are sometimes drawn closer into a single part, only to have the next composition reveal a greater sense of the whole. Scale is used for both intimacy and impact in Fenn’s work, where the use of raw wood gives a weighty juxtaposition to the iconography which sits atop the surface but almost feels inlaid, recessed or part of a subtractive process at times.

Even a casual encounter with her paintings shows us how seamless lines can fall within the precision of well panned contours, producing an effect that feels more like evidence of natural artifacts encased in reflective and refractive surfaces. A true master of the medium, Fenn has given us a new type of iconography to study, one which seems connected to the explosion of virtual and synthetic worlds, but which still manages to elicit a warmth of hand-crafted objects made manifest as an embodied aesthetic experience.

Daniel Funkhouser

Daniel Funkhouser’s work engages with the most advanced means for fabricating multi-layered pieces that mix traditional materials with the most innovative techniques of manufacture today. Laser routers, CNC machining, 3-D printing, and a whole host of other methods for interlocking and interlacing compositional elements have emerged as a part of Funkhouser’s aesthetic in recent years, giving his pieces a distinctness that makes them instantaneously recognizable anywhere in the Valley.

Figuration, abstraction, pattern and design all play an equal role in Funkhouser’s artistic practice, but in his work they take on a distinctly heightened sense of vibratory measures, iconic power and hallucinatory intimations. By mixing the aesthetic dispositions attributed to Pop and Op-Art with installation projects and site-specific concerns, Funkhouser has gained a significant degree of notoriety for his public projects, which elicit a rare joy and fascination for everyone who encounters them. Recognized as one of the most significant talents in the state, the influence of Funkhouser’s work continues to advance the dialogue around abstraction, figuration and the function of the geometric motifs with regards to how we experience contemporary art today.

Danielle Hacche

Danielle Hacche’s work is one of the most powerful examples of embodied elegance unfettered by any extraneous moves since the reign of the Abstract Classicists. A stunning integration between design and intuition makes for nothing short of an economic sense of execution with each and every piece. After all, few would deny that Hacche’s compositions create an almost Zen like quality of tranquility, balance and harmony. This is because point and counterpoint, line and block forms, curvilinear and rectilinear passages are all woven together in her work through a sophisticated sensibility that dances across paper, merges with the canvas and even enriches the effects attributable to large-scale murals.

A first encounter with Hacche’s work reveals a sure hand, an equality of measured intent and a democratic sensibility that opens itself up to a wide variety of art lovers, and yet, for those engaged in the critical discourse of contemporary art, there is a weightiness behind the specificity attributed to every move in Hacche’s oeuvre that bespeaks a level of mastery rarely seen in art today. This is because her aesthetic is truly hybrid, synthesizing so many of the programs of geometric art from the past into new and original configurations.

What is particularly striking about how her art practice has developed over the years are the many ways that Hacche has been able to marry the qualities of scalability with intimacy, imprint with impact, and mechanical means with a powerful sense of poetics. For all of these reasons, Hacche has long been recognized as one of the Valley’s rare talents and as an art star who’s increasing recognition by the greater artworld is long overdue.

Lisa Von Hoffner

Lisa Von Hoffner gives us a both a painterly and a sculptural aesthetic, where backlit geometries refract light through a million different facets of the work during different times of day. Part minimalist monochromes, part phenomenological pleasures, Hoffner’s gold and silver discs speak to how we understand the auspicious nature of the commodity-form represented here by a panoply of embolden surfaces. Fitted together rather seamlessly, they are part of an art historical puzzle that mixes the valences of abstraction with the effects of the Finish Fetish school and the Light and Space movement.

As a traditionally trained representational painter, Hoffner’s more abstract works provide a distinctive counter-balance to the kind of conservatism that is often associated with figurative painting. In recent years, her abstract works have become celebrated stand-alone pieces that engage in strategies of re-appropriation, assemblage and the hybrid stylization of opulence unbounded.

Dazzling synthetic colors mixed with atmospheric effects make Hoffer’s projects touch on the experience of the synthetic sublime while courting everyday art lovers with so many ques from the carnivalesque. Taken together, these qualities make Hoffner a creative voice to be reckoned with as her work has gained wider and wider exposure from her years as an emerging artist, up to, and including the stunning accomplishments of the present.

Travis Ivey

Travis Ivey’s aesthetic exists at the crossroads where industrial manufacture meets with different modalities of impressionism. Tape, vinyl, and the kind of scored surfaces that require a quick cut of incised color allow Ivey to make the punch of a pin-stripping aesthetic function like a modern-day shadow box of pixels and pentimenti. High Key chromatic landscapes appear from within his geometric arrangements like so many synthetic futures coming in and out of focus at different distances for viewing. And the way that Ivey has used re-appropriated and discarded material to create representational imagery gives his work a biting edge of social commentary about the realms of environmentalism and the politics of reclamation.

Ivey is a polymath of course in that he is both a representational painter, someone who occasionally works in the abstract, and he is also able to blend these two disparate perspectives seamlessly. A rare gift in the age of codified styles and marketable artistic identities, Ivey is likely to continue to surprise his fans and patrons alike by always evolving his aesthetic to include more of what’s possible and less of what’s already been done.

The design elements of his big mural projects, the manifestation of his material explorations, and the maximalist tendencies that encompass the growing vocabulary of Ivey’s oeuvre mean that his visual repertoire is always expanding, mutating and transforming as an artist. Yet, it is the deployment of these qualities in just the right measure that has allowed Ivey’s works to be widely recognized in the Valley today, not just as a leading talent, but as someone whose pieces are sought after by some of the most influential collectors in the Arizona artworld and beyond.

Mike Jacobs

Mike Jacobs mixes assemblage aesthetics with formalist interventions throughout his compositional choices, not to mention the complexity of how color and form interact across the surface of any one piece. A truly hybrid producer, both figurative and abstract elements abound in Jacob’s art practice, where nearly every kind of motif can enter into the mix, unabated. The use of an edited image, a cropped sequence, and an unexpected juxtaposition all speak to the fragmentation and recomposition of phenomenological experience that has become common in the early twenty-first century.

Jacob’s remedies this precarious situation by orchestrating each selection of iconographic material in a way that alludes to its original source material but transforms it into something wholly new and unexpected. The scrim of images he pulls from life, advertising, and art history are all woven together into a seamless whole that makes the pictorial field function like a punctum of sorts. This Barthesian reference refers to the representational wound opened up by being-in-the-world, i.e., by a confrontation with the kinds of significant details that serve to establish an immediate and perfunctory relationship between a discrete object of perception and the person viewing it.

It is this quality of the one-to-one experience, of seeing the hand of the maker in every aspect of the object — or of the labor-intensive quality of fitted adjustments, tweaked configurations and the process of pictorial condensation — that comprises the most significant pieces in Jacob’s oeuvre. Taken on the whole, the experience of a punctum-like quality in his work produces a visual epiphany of sorts that touches on the ineffable, which pervades his entire aesthetic. This is because Jacob’s work is best seen in person, both to admire the complexity of the congress of images, but also to better understand how the selection of materials and the methods of manufacture work together to create a gestalt impression of lasting measure. There are few artists working today where the fusion of the sculptural, the painterly and the post-painterly have taken on the kind of expanded dimensions that have made Jacob’s work into one of the most well-recognized aesthetics in the Valley, not to mention how well-respected they are in the art world at large.

Carrie Marril

Carrie Marril uses the abstraction and geometric signs and symbols in a more personal and poetic refrain. Allusions to patterns from other cultures, the patterns at play in our own lives and how we pattern our artistic practice as a means of addressing the greater concerns of the world make Marril’s engagement with the geometric truly unique in the art market today. Her aesthetic dazzles the eye with pure virtuosity by being involved in the play of revealing and concealing. Toward this end, Marril’s pictorial choices require a keen viewer who can decipher the codes and visual keys that reveal the underlying concerns behind the work that may not be readily apparent upon a first viewing.

Part subtle and mysterious tones, part gold and silver opulence, Marril is able to play the tension of the full chromatic scale off against the raw substrate of the canvas. Her ability to bring together abstract and representational elements into a seamlessly aesthetic experience is unmatched in the world of painting. Her many bodies of work, dedication to a level of craft that is impeccable, and ongoing development of themes that are as diverse as they are intimate, makes Marril’s oeuvre something that one can return to again and again, and always find some completely new hidden by the delicate and thoughtful orchestration of her projects. A rare voice in geometric painting today, Marril is sure to be one of the most sought after and collected artists in the decades ahead because she is already recognized as a rising star by both critics and contemporaries alike.

Mark Pomillio

Mark Pomillio has been building a body of work based on geometries, how we understand the interweaving of space and time as a material force, and the subtle building up of pentimenti and chromatic vibrations in service of his chosen subject matter. His influence as both a painter and a teacher has been immense in Arizona, and many of the artists in the state who have pursued the geometric impulse have studied under his tutelage. The large-scale mural projects, the bold dynamism of curved cavasses and the dynamic harmony of his chromatic choices placed alongside the delicacy of his charcoal drawings — all of this has set his body of work on par with the very best abstract painters working in the world today.

Pomilio is known for having deployed the use of the overall in relation to fractal geometries; he has reconstructed the arena in which the artist acts by challenging flatbed style painting tout court; and he has proven that the dictums of essentialism and the truth to materials can be bent, craned and cradled in a way that allows a new vision of the valences of objecthood to emerge before our very eyes. This tri-part accomplishment not only reveals his mastery of modern painting, but it shows us how Pomilio is able to go beyond paintings most entrenched diatribes in order to create a contemporary body of work that demonstrates a renewed sense of relevance for geometric abstraction in the twenty-first century.

Rembrandt Quiballo

Rembrandt Quiballo has earned a well-deserved reputation within the realm of post-digital aesthetics by mixing various forms of naturalism with the practices of data-bending, the use of computational artifacts, and the sequencing of various styles and serial imagery. Interrupted streaming effects, file corruption and other glitch effects permeate his compositions as they unfold in real-time, challenging the notion of a stable reality and extending the kinds of concerns that arose around simulacra and simulationist aesthetics. Part digital decay, part an aesthetics of the sublime, we experience the reflection of what Lyotard called “the figural”, only it has been transposed into both surreal and irreal worlds, even if they are composed of 1’s and 0’s.

Many of the diatribes around Post-digital aesthetics pick up where modernism left off with the debates around the function of finish or the degree of “unfinish” in painting, only in the digital realm this same motif is posited as part of the inherent tension between the apparatus of display and the conflict with rendering times. Whether it’s Quiballo’s metallic substrates that disrupt the stability of the gaze, the warping of his video imagery into abstract bits and bytes of data, or the permutations of different lines and levels of mediation, his oeuvre points to the shifting ground between the real and the virtual that we encounter all around us. Often thought of as a form of computational “de-programming”, the spread of glitch aesthetics point to the nature of artifice as an irrepressible force on this side of the digital divide, and Quiballo may very well be one of the best cartographers of these changes working in the field of contemporary art today.

Travis Rice

Travis Rice is among one of the most well-recognized voices in geometric painting today. His challenging compositions, sculptural designs and painterly engagement with the world of geometric forms is defined by the visual impact of nothing short of a riotous use of color. This is only offset by the elegance of his black and white drawings, which are composed of the same or similar motifs, but which are rendered in a more pared down, reductive manner. They form a series of subtler explorations that function as an elegant springboard for the folding of forms and extreme rigor of geometric modeling that Rice transforms into a dynamic play of colliding planes, pulsating hues and pleasurable sensations.

Foreground and background elements often sit within a dramatic expanse in Rice’s work, while specific motifs feel as if they sit abutted against the very surface upon which they are rendered. Glitter, glazing materials and other forms of industrial lacquer play a big role in the execution of the work, which lets the geometric figures stand out against the depth and dazzle of his bejeweled backgrounds. More recently Rice has ventured into stripe painting, with the added twist that the linear elements in these works are actually his trademark ratchet and bolt shapes turned on their side. Playing flatness against depth, structure against substrate, and systems thinking against the infinite play of variation marks Rice’s project as being one of the most relevant and timely interventions in geometric painting today.

Daniel Funkhouser

Danielle Hacche

Lisa Von Hoffner

Lisa Von Hoffner gives us a both a painterly and a sculptural aesthetic, where backlit geometries refract light through a million different facets of the work during different times of day. Part minimalist monochromes, part phenomenological pleasures, Hoffner’s gold and silver discs speak to how we understand the auspicious nature of the commodity-form represented here by a panoply of embolden surfaces. Fitted together rather seamlessly, they are part of an art historical puzzle that mixes the valances of abstraction with the effects of the Finish Fetish school and the Light and Space movement.

As a traditionally trained representational painter, Hoffner’s more abstract works provide a distinctive counter-balance to the kind of conservativism that is often associated with figurative painting. In recent years, her abstract works have become celebrated stand-alone pieces that engage in strategies of re-appropriation, assemblage and the hybrid stylization of opulence unbounded.

Travis Ivey

Mike Jacobs

Carrie Marril

Part subtle and mysterious tones, part gold and silver opulence, Marril is able to play the tension of the full chromatic scale off against the raw substrate of the canvas. Her ability to bring together abstract and representational elements into a seamlessly aesthetic experience is unmatched in the world of painting. Her many bodies of work, dedication to a level of craft that is impeccable, and ongoing development of themes that are as diverse as they are intimate makes Marril’s oeuvre something that one can return to again and again, and always find some completely new hidden by the delicate and thoughtful orchestration of her projects. A rare voice in geometric painting today, Marril is sure to be one of the most sought after and collected artists in the years and decades ahead because she is already recognized as a rising star by both critics and her contemporaries in the present.

Francisco Flores Pizano

Francisco Flores Pizano is one of the most innovative artists working in immersive light, space and neon today. His projects are epic in scale, often transforming who warehouses, buildings, or outside events into otherworldly experiences. At the heart of his work is a concern with how light can evoke a spiritual dimension in our everyday experience. Having explored different modes of religious inquiry throughout his life has allowed Pizano to tap into traditions that are as different as Christianity and Kriya yoga. More recently, the symbolic dimension of Pizano’s work included subtle references to the Mayan temples, mosques and other more contemporary forms of architecture from around the world.

This unique mix has allowed people to write about his art as an embodiment of “secular sacredness” that combines the feeling of greater self-awareness with the ambience of techno-mystical spaces. Through different bodies of work, Pizano’s goal has been to create both virtual and actual experiences that engender a sense of mutual respect, care and understanding about each other as well as the journey of inner development. By activating our senses through an aesthetics of mystery, magnificence and mystique, Pizano’s works entreats the viewer to explore the terrain of both inner and outer space — as well as territories unknown. Thus, it is this unique ability cultivate unexpected encounters with the uncanny and ethereal happenings, that makes Pizano’s works some of the most meditative and immersive environments being produced anywhere in the artworld today.

Mark Pomillio

Mark Pomillio has been building a body of work based on geometries, how we understand the interweaving of space and time as a material force, and the subtle building up of pentimenti and chromatic vibrations in service of his chosen subject matter. His influence as both and painter and a teacher has been immense in Arizona, and many of the artists in the state who have pursued the geometric impulse have studied under his tutelage. The large-scale mural projects, the bold dynamism of curved cavasses and the dynamic harmony of his chromatic choices placed alongside the delicacy of his charcoal drawings — all of this has set his body of work on par with the very best abstract painters working in the world today.

Pomilio is known for having deployed the use of the overall in relation to fractal geometries; he has reconstructed the arena in which the artists acts by challenging flatbed style painting tout court; and he has proved that the dictums of essentialism and the truth to materials can be bent, craned and cradled to give us a new vision of the valances of objecthood. This tri-part accomplishment not only reveals his mastery of modern painting, but it shows us how Pomilio is able to go beyond paintings most entrenched diatribes in order to create a contemporary body of work that demonstrates a renewed sense of relevance for geometric abstraction in the twenty-first century.

Rembrandt Quiballo

Rembrandt Quiballo has earned a well-deserved reputation within the realm of post-digital aesthetics by mixing various forms of naturalism with the practices of data-bending, the use of computational artifacts, and the sequencing of various styles and serial imagery. Interrupted streaming effects, file corruption and other glitch effects permeate his compositions as they unfold in real-time, challenging the notion of a stable reality and extending the kinds of concerns that arose around simulacra and simulationist aesthetics. Part digital decay, part an aesthetics of the sublime, we experience the reflection of the what Lyotard called the figural, only it has been transposed into both surreal and irreal worlds, even if they are composed of 1’s and 0’s.

Travis Rice

Jason Ward

Jason Ward is a dynamic cartographer of how the virtual and the actual are mutually implicated in systems of information exchange. Modernist architecture, geometric murals, improvised digital landscapes and even computational projects about mapping the world around us all play into Ward’s artistic practice in equal measure. His aesthetic sits at the very forefront of understanding how we are enmeshed in systems of logistics and forms of logocentrism that are associated with geometric motifs.

His most recent projects have focused on how the notion of identity is bound to the types of ideation that we readily ascribe to a sense of place and space. Here, the notion of space is meant to be part of how we decode, demarcate and catalog images while the idea of place is connected to how we process, interpret, and assign different types of meaning to cultural and computational codes. These kinds of critical interventions are needed during a time when the landscape is undergoing an unprecedented process of global documentation through surveillance and many other means. Of course, all of this has implications for our shared social and political existence. How much and to what degree we can be surveilled; how this information is used and how quickly we can be located; and whether or not all of this takes place in real-time or against what kinds of restrictions — is a grey area fraught with legal conflicts and widespread contestation.

That is because it is these same issues that are embedded in how we understand who controls space, visibility, and the right to be seen. Our sense of heritage, history, and even cultural landmarks, are increasingly viewed within the context that has come to be known as a “politics of optics”. In this cultural climate, Ward’s aesthetic represents a queering of the genre of landscape painting — an opening up that allows us to see the spaces we inhabit otherwise — constituting a type of interventionism in what he refers to as “maligned geographies”. For Ward, these are spaces that have acquired negative cultural connotations in the cultural imaginary, but which, through direct and performative actions, have been transformed in symbols of empowerment on a regional, national or even international stage. For all of these reasons, and many more not mentioned here, Ward’s projects are among the most challenging and timely interventions into landscape painting and geometric art being made in the world today.

RJ Ward

RJ Ward has been working at the limits of visual and cognitive abstraction in new media art for more than a few decades, but it is his most recent pieces which directly address the geometry of perception. His use of geometric anamorphosis is a way of examining the intersection of self-perception, political perception, social perceptions and much more. In Ward’s hands color and geometric imagery unfold in sequences accompanied by text that give us a direct connection with the psycho-synthesis of chromatic, genomic, and formal patterning. These images, in turn, are about the transcription of modalities of seeing in time, of experiencing through affect, and of touching on intimations of the virtual and the real that ask us to dissolve our previous perceptions and to think about how we encounter the word around us anew.

One of the most interesting figures working today on post-anthropological ways of knowing, the use of the real-time image in Ward’s work is evocative of multiple levels of reality and perception, as well as how they collude, collide and even elide our common way of encountering reality. Instead Ward’s morphologies want us to confront the intersection of abstract, representational, scientific, and cosmological ways of knowing which ask us to question the secure position of the cartesian subject. When we encounter Ward’s work we are put into the position of unknowing; into a place of inerrant coordinated and aesthetic coordination that marks his work as being one of the most challenging and exciting new media artists today.

Grant Wiggins

Working in the space between minimalist and maximalist impulses, Wiggins art combines the best of both to make images that are as contradictory as they are compelling. Equally inspired by the classicism of Hard Edge painting, the accessibility of computer graphics, and the punch of Pop Art, his particular aesthetic has its origins in a process of sampling different motifs and then remixing imagery by working in series. In this way Wiggins is able to draw upon the visual beats and syncopated rhythms of geometric art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while producing paintings that give us something entirely new and of the contemporary moment.

Based on the play of visual point and counterpoint, Wiggins work challenges our notions about the boundaries between computational design and personal style. A polymath of the graphic idiom, his artworks express both an insistency on specific choices and wide variety of compositional commitments. Clean lines, colorful curves, and interlocking shapes all collide on his canvases to produce a sense of visual opulence that is seldomly matched by other artists working in the same genre. In this way, Wiggins art gives us a sense of visual impact and immediacy that is a rare accomplishment in the discourse about the intersection of art and design today.

Ben Willis

Ben Willis’s geometric paintings are like eye-candy for the soul. They are comprised of the most divine of optical pleasures inasmuch as they outstrip the means of the Finish Fetish school, they reach beyond the polemic perspectives of Op-Art and they dive head first into the visual hedonism of living in the here and now. While they have more in common with what one critic termed the “Fabulist aesthetic” of the British Sensationlists, they achieve this in a refrain that is wholly abstract. Multi-layered by several scores of depth, Willis’s surfaces are as bedazzled as they are bejeweled, reaching a clarity of craft that is more in dialogue with the effects of diamonds than the tooth of a canvas. Touch is nearly absent from these works which rely on transforming the “cool” nature of machine manufacture into that of a “warm” and inviting register. We can feel how each layer of care and consideration in Willis’s works are in service of kind of hand-baked recipe that relies on the transmutation of materials as much as it does a visual riot of confectionary delights.

There is afterall, a magnetic quality to each of Willis’s pieces that makes the viewer want to touch, hold and even lick these pristine surfaces, as if interacting with an exuberant splash of color could transform the beholder’s desires by making them manifestly real. Recently the art theorist Mario Pernolia wrote about the sex appeal of inorganic materials, and it’s safe to say that Willis’s contribution to synthetic aesthetics certainly qualifies his work to be the perfected embodiment of inorganicity made sexy. His painting flirt with viewers by way of the sumptuous use of color; they floss their status by way of reflectivity and gloss; they even entice patrons with embedded visual delicacies that can only be revealed in their full measure upon closer approach.

In other words, Willis’s work asks you to come on over and make a pitch or a proposition, because it isn’t interested in being a wallflower in the gallery one moment past the point of purchase. These, after all, are paintings that want to go home with you. Taken together, all of the above of mark Willis’s oeuvre as one of the most seductive and daring art practices of our times because he celebrates, quite unabashedly, those qualities of suspicion in art that everyone dare not speak their name: visual joy, an elicited sense of happiness and the play of allure unrepentant. For this, we can only thank Willis for diving into the depths of an opticality unbound that few would dare to venture, and rarely with such stunning results.