JEFF HALLBAUER
At the Hour of Closing Summer
Opening reception: Thurs, Sept 7, 6 – 8pm
Sept 7 – Oct 7
HOURS: Tues – Sat, 11 – 5 PM
WAAP is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by JEFF HALLBAUER. Hallbauer’s new works are like variations on a theme. The patternistic paintings are based on specific portraiture source material; by defamiliarizing them and emphasizing their material presence – a vivid dot, a line, a swoop, an evocative plane of colour – and by placing these elements up against each other, the paintings are evocative of similar experiments in the deconstructing and parsing of language in modernist poetry.
The paintings reveal the patterns of rhythm and syntactical structure that can emerge in paintings. By constantly inflecting and estranging the composition, the glimpse the artist is providing of the original portrait sources can often feel uroboric, spiralling into itself. The paintings, with their fragments of identities becoming unfixed, can feel like an apt metaphor for the complexity of contemporary identity. That the repetitions are ordered and bound up speaks to the sense we make of the world by articulation. These abstract compositions confront our temptation to extract specific meaning from which the painting is situated.
