February 02 - February 24, 2007

Scott Wallis | Depth of Field - work on paper | review

> opening Saturday, February 03 | 4-8pm

Untitled P.708 - 2007, Acrylic on Paper 18”x24”

No. 7 Untitled (P.608)

Untitled P.705
2006, oil & digital pigment print on canvas, 18" x 24"

Untitled P.705
2006, oil & digital pigment print on canvas, 18" x 24"

Depth of Field presents a new body of work that continues my investigation into the facts and illusions of abstraction. While my past work used various types and treatments of transparent film to track down new spins on the old Modernist “problems” of figure and ground, I have here ventured to bring the same kind of analysis to bear on the humble sheet of paper. Descended from the slashed canvases of Lucio Fontana’s “Concetti Spaziali” and Don Judd’s wall mounted sculpture, these pieces play with similar ideas of the pictorial and actual. And as we can’t quite call Fontana’s work ‘oil on canvas’, nor Judd’s simply ‘sculpture’, identifying these pieces as work on paper is convenient but ostensibly misleading, for they are much more. The sheet of paper here is no mere support.

The graphics that hold the plane, primarily minimal grids and serial squares, are partially cut away, creating apertures in the supporting paper, into which I have fixed walled cavities constructed of similarly painted surfaces or, recalling Judd’s repertoire of materials, brass, copper and aluminum. The subtle variations in spatial relief, and often ambiguous play of light, elicits a physical movement in the viewer that cites a space far more extensive than the small scale of this work would at first suggest.

Unlike Fontana’s gesture of the knife splitting the canvas, my treatment of the paper approaches a surgical precision, an exacting cut in the material locked to the composition with a care akin to Judd’s standard of fabrication. And, in a corresponding departure, the relatively small scale and concentrated intimacy of my work breaks with the often grand theatricality of Judd’s installations

My work nevertheless keeps faith with Modernism and its project to disclose the materiality of its means -- to make work grounded in the empirical, but also magical in its simplicity.

Scott Wallis

Untitled P.715
2007, Acrylic on Paper 18”x24”