Douglas Witmer
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Wednesday, January 10, 2007
parting words from richmond
I'm off to the University of Dayton. Meanwhile, my exhibition at Red Door Gallery in Richmond, Virginia closes this coming Saturday. Brick Weekly published this thorough review of the show, by Vittorio Colaizzi, today. Since Brick is not online, I've excerpted below. You can read the full review here on my site.
Decoration haunts abstraction, pacifying its disruptive potential so that it may be assimilated into “the arts.” The best paintings are embodied visual thinking, and we think them every bit as much as we see them. Decoration, on the other hand, is not thought but recitation, the expert assemblage of various tropes for a handsome effect. This dialectic has nothing to do with style or technique, and cannot be simplified as “rough” vs. “slick.” Nor is this distinction intended to denigrate all pattern-based abstraction, which can sometimes be a corrective to stagnant conventions. Decoration occurs when a viewer is told what he or she wants to hear, and abstraction occurs when comfort is refused. The distinction is rarely clear, and viewers will always disagree on what constitutes mere repetition and what constitutes adventurous dwelling in the unfamiliar. Douglas Witmer incorporates the very opposition of decoration vs. thought, or recitation vs. discovery, into his paintings, and makes it a part of our experience.
Read the complete review...
Labels: critical reviews, exhibitions
10.1.07 
1 Comments:
Congratulations on the review. I hadn't picked this issue up.
"perpetual almost-ness" is praise of the highest order, in my book. And I agree with that assessment.
However, I cannot agree with Collaizi's assertion that you are "often expressed in architecture in [your] native Pennsylvania." I've never seen ...oh, wait, that was a dangling particple.
By 
, at
1/11/2007