Exhibition Catalog for
Jeffrey Nemeroff: Recent Work
Neuhoff Gallery
New York, New York
Elements of Abstraction
By Kóan Jeff Baysa
Edited by Samantha Bernstein
In his debut New York solo exhibition at Neuhoff Gallery, Los Angeles painter Jeffrey Nemeroff creates a world of organic abstractions in a new series of paintings. Using painterly skills he invokes the simultaneous push-pull of macro- and micro-perspectives, collapsing and expanding scale from the galactic to the microscopic and back. In these particular works, Nemeroff uses oil on canvas collaged with string, occasionally incorporating fabric swatches or wallpaper. With some images, he uses a subtractive method of layering oil over an acrylic image to reveal an under-painting.
Quoting the Dada movement with its use of assemblage, collage, photomontage as well as the use of readymade objects that all gained wide acceptance due to their use are highly influential for Nemeroff. Famed artist Marcel Duchamp’s technique of creating paintings by dropping single meters of string onto horizontal canvases, incorporating time and chance as mediums can be seen in his noted works, Three Standard Stoppages; is repurposed by Nemeroff to create other works. In a similar but distinctly different process from Duchamp, Nemeroff uses a gelled string to “draw” a line, adjusting, adding or removing sections of it from the surface of the painting until it is set, then addresses other issues like color and figure-ground relationships. Collaged elements combined with texture are used as a visual foil contrasting with the painted elements of the works, have been a part of Nemeroff’s artistic practice for more than twenty years. He uses artificial, mass-produced, and repetitive pattern fabrics in his paintings, combining found objects and handmade creations together in a surprising and stunning arrangement.
Within the wide spectrum of nonrepresentational work, organic abstraction predominantly derives its inspiration from forms in nature. Nemeroff states that in his works, the randomness of the color palette and the wavering between chaos and calm are all derived from natural references. Viewing permutations of pigmented hills against changing skies he composes his color scheme and compositional sense. Nemeroff uses imagery like the vast and calm ocean with formless jellyfish and sinuous kelp beds as another source of influence for his abstracted imagery.
The four round abstract roseate and mandala-like images are painted in suffused colors played against the textured physicality of the string. Blue #2 and Blue, painted as the name suggests, one a fainter version of the other, resemble dream catchers filtering pleasant visions. In Naples Yellow, the distinct compartments recall the planes of a stained glass window, while its central density of elaborated lines imparts an illusion of depth. The work entitled Green Aqua, with its concentric arrangements, invokes universal references to the sun, as well as the philosophical search for the center.
The second groups of paintings are described by the artist as elemental and abstract, referencing nature through their resemblances to asteroids and breccias. In a Duchampian reference of deploying the readymade in art, some are painted onto an undersurface of wallpaper, layering the handmade and the readymade. The central images in Blue White, Medallion, and Yellow Gray, with microcrystalline and diatomaceous aspects flecked with lapis, cinnabar and sulfur. These works also bear resemblance to colorfully arranged petals from deconstructed flowers.
Organic is the word chosen by the artist to describe his third group of more loosely and less geometrically painted works. Black and Black Green, with their quadrants of subtle tints, underscore the visual tropism of their arrangements. Prussian Yellow favors the feel of the sky at dusk through autumnal foliage; on a cellular scale, the details could be read as vital and marrow-like. The works, Orange Red and Yellow Blue, share similar topologies of aggregate parts on a planetary scale, but unmoored from any points of reference in their vacant backgrounds, appear weightless or even buoyant.
These paintings incorporate serendipity, allowing the physical properties and positioning of the string on the canvas to guide the directions of these works, as well as the interplay of the readymade with the hand of the artist. With the ultimate goal of achieving equilibrium among the formal issues of painting, between chaos and calm from the natural world, and the integration of individual abstracted elements into a coherent whole, Jeffrey Nemeroff succeeds brilliantly.