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JUDITH NELSON "Portrait d'artiste" 17 septembre - 10 octobre 2015 Arnaud Lefebvre Cette exposition de Judith Nelson clôt la série des « Portraits d’artistes » qui a eu lieu à ma galerie sur toute une année. Avec Judith Nelson cette série arrive à une célébration. Ce n’est pas un hasard si Judith Nelson a saisi en quelques mots le principe de ces « Portraits d’artistes » : «En associant les visiteurs à la personne qui crée l'art et dans le but de communiquer avec l'artiste et l'artiste avec les visiteurs, le cycle "Portrait d'artistes" est un partage de l'intégralité du processus de création». Elle décrit une sorte de boucle qui s’opère dans la fabrication et la réception d’une œuvre d’art liant l’artiste et la personne spectatrice dans un processus d’échange. Cette exposition finale des « Portraits d’artistes » montrera un choix de gravures que Judith Nelson a réalisé entre 1967 et 1972. C’est un rare ensemble d’une fraîcheur et d’une cohérence étonnante qui nous font pénétrer dans l’histoire de la peinture américaine de cette époque, où les grands espaces picturaux et l'épopée du Pop Art servent d’ingrédients à une relecture opérée sur le vif du passage de ce rêve démocratique américain à la réalité de la guerre du Vietnam et des mouvements sociaux. Cette interprétation s'exprime par le langage de la taille douce et de l’intelligence manuelle de Judith Nelson, et fait cohabiter deux espaces apparemment antagonistes: celui de l’ « ancien monde » de la ligne et du « nouveau monde » de la couleur. Le « Portrait d’artiste » de Judith Nelson montrera également son projet de catalogue rétrospectif de 100 vues d’œuvres postérieures à ses gravures. De même, son mari, le poète Paul Nelson, interviendra pendant le vernissage pour présenter sa façon de percevoir le travail de la personne avec qui il a partagé sa vie. Je les remercie tous les deux très sincèrement. Voir l'article de Pauline Lisowski sur l'exposition (sur le blog www.lecorridordelart.com) Judith Neslon "ENTRE LES ESPACES" 2015 (traduction française plus bas) As extension of drawing, I learned the intaglio printmaking alchemy by hand engraving with a burin, acid bath for hard ground etching needle lines, soft ground resin, aquatint for greys, all sorts of blacks. The limitations of intaglio teased me into using its tools without the catechism of its history. I added white spaces, color shapes. The expansion of shapes that pressed into the paper held onto pulled ink from below the surface while color and hard flat edges joined as puzzles of relief and embossing. Geometry appears in corners and angles that nest with the inky world of intaglio. The clean color edges weight the shapes. It’s about organizing an image that anticipates combinations of inked parts working with the paper surface where grid and pattern rule, with nothing loose or gestured. It is a base from which the elements inside have twisted, shifted, nudged each other for position. Shapes that hinge together make thick planes that tilt and bend, float in space. Gradually, color printing with rotational symmetry replaced the intaglio plates with superimposed, transparent planes overlapping, cropped to fill the square. With hole drilled templates I spray painted primary red, yellow, blue through screens for Benday shade and shadow of white shapes that blend into grey with distance viewing. My work has been infused with imprinting and repetition in spite of the technique used. I press inked leaves, pods, shells to multiply an image. Unlike the precision of intaglio and screens, I now allow the imperfections of manual print application to integrate surface character with assemblage. I test the confines of my process, like sport or dance, by pushing further into invention. My fascination has always been to combine various media, especially unlikely sources, that produce a new way of seeing of which a viewer may be unaware, but accepts the piece as a whole. ........................ Barry Goldensohn Judith Nelson’s prints move off the surface of the page and take on three dimensions as if they were sculptural. For pure abstraction they seem unaccountably witty. Maybe it is the quality of surprise at the daring compositions or simply the viewer’s recognition of a lordly intelligence at work altering the conventions. ........................ Lorrie Goldensohn The Prints of Judith Nelson’s new retrospective show derive from the work of a young woman who had yet to discover how keen and strong her sense of color would prove. Mostly, the chaste palette of these prints restricts itself to a rich and varied black--allowing much delicate line-drawing, intricate shading and filigree--accompanied by mostly two-tone blue, a plain red and a plain pink, as well as an occasional bright spectrum yellow. Banners, flags, diamond and scimitar shapes in color dangle, hang, and flirt with the eye, gliding in and out of symmetry. While the incised shapes are abstract, half-hovering between suggestions of page-filling landscape or surreal, contained object, they have a dreamy, covert relationship to the recognizable streets, buildings, windows, carpets, or furniture of daily life, often in comic vein. These are pieces with distinct moods, some somber, reflective, some funny and abrupt. In one print, something like a sock or a boot shape comes down on what resembles a black popsicle, or a lounge chair. Several have helmet shapes, or closed or partly open spheres with inscrutable events and landscapes tantalizingly sketched, etched inside. Nelson’s angles have an exhilarating oddity, and depth and surface read ambiguously, tantalizing us, daring us to orient in her spaces. Shadows lurk in the shadows: things come forward or go back mysteriously, their continuities a ripe puzzle; or, a dominant shape will hang in a white suspension, letting us glimpse the complex and inviting tracery actively inside what appears to be an aqueous world. The suggestion of the fantastic is strong, the means elegant; Nelson’s clean, clear technical mastery is everywhere evident. The play between the witty line, color, shape and volume is exquisite. While the means are restrained, the tactile surfaces of this work, its crisp edges and the angles of the embossed and creamy paper, also invite the inquisitive hand as well as the questing eye. .................................. Paul Nelson —Statement for the Opening I think of imagination as a risky quiet within which one makes images. Sounds, tastes, smells, visions, sounds, textures and weights …made of words, wood, strings or keys, spices, motions in air and materials like paper. A dancer leaps, makes an image in the air, and then another, or minces across the floor, each mince a photographic still. A composite? A composition? Expecting, predicting recognition. A painter or printmaker creates a seemingly static piece within which the imagery moves with one’s eye, takes reference, invents reference, comes alive, quietly feral. A poet can say the bark of the tree is gray, if given to cliché. Or can give life to the image by saying the bark is gray to his touch. Because perhaps the poet is feeling old, wan, without light and spirit. Or merely stoic. Images are reflective and for artists self-reflective. We speak of Goya’s “black period,” recognizing in his late, carboniferous canvases and prints his depression about our species and its future. Art lives as imagery. We must be willing and able to come to it prepared to imagine, not to receive…..to “see,” not just look. To “feel” what it is like to be in the air, a dancer who lives for that instant, and the others that follow. The sound of an oboe is haunting. We respond, examine our reponse, how that sound in the music works with some experience or attitude within each of us. We imagine back, make our own images and referents because of what we sense from the art. Many are shy about accepting the invitation, but not all, eh? I learned to be project oriented from Judith. Her way of working, so silent, except when swearing at the size of her studio, is her parallel universe of imagery. I had to learn that it was OK to go there, to my own. And pretty much stay. Not a pragmatic way to live. The making of images happens in a very real world, the one I walk and sleep in, but first in the one in my head, which is more fun. History, especially one’s own, is always fiction. Yes, the American Civil War happened; Vietnam happened, as did the French Revolutions, and there are relevant “facts,” but our individual minds make narratives, movies of either, can even link them, fictively, with no regard to time. I love the movie in my brain; it has been running since my birth and is a private theater where I can discover or invent imagery with narrative with which to objectify my reveries in poetry. My movie affects my behavior. A phrase T S Eliot came up with is useful. He said that poets and novelists seek and make “objective correlatives.” So, art works indirectly. Not evasively. Artists infer, deflect, do not really make statements baldly, do not “say” or explain, but create experience that engages, makes a viewer or reader “feel” and come to their own reasoning. The walls here mark a decade or so of Judith’s visions. I owe Judith my life, so to speak. Her catalogue shows 100 pieces selected from 700 slides and photographs of work done over close to sixty years. Her work is changing as I speak, imagining what will do as expression of her response to being quietly, fully, tenuously alive. ................................... Traduction française ................................... Judith Nelson ENTRE LES ESPACES 2015 Comme une extension du dessin, j’ai appris l’alchimie de la taille-douce en gravant à la main avec le burin, au bain d'acide pour des lignes tracées à l’aiguille sur un support dur et un support souple en résine, l’aquatinte pour les gris, pour toutes sortes de noirs. Les limites de la taille-douce ont aiguillonné mon sens de la technique sans le catéchisme de son histoire. J’ai ajouté des espaces blancs, des formes colorées. L'expansion des formes pressées sur le papier était contenue par l'encre appliquée par dessous la surface du papier, tandis que la couleur et les bordures nettes se mêlaient comme des imbroglios de relief et de gaufrage. La géométrie apparaît dans les coins et les angles qui se nichent dans le monde maculé d’encre de la taille-douce. Les bords bien nets de couleur donnent du poids aux formes. Il s’agit d’organiser une image qui anticipe le jeu combiné des parties encrées sur la surface du papier, où la grille et le motif sont la règle, sans rien de lâche ou de gesticulé. C’est une base à partir de laquelle les éléments intérieurs se sont emmêlés, déplacés, légèrement poussés les uns contre les autres pour s’établir une place. Les formes qui s’articulent les unes avec les autres produisent des plans épais qui s’inclinent et se courbent, en flottaison dans l'espace. Progressivement, l'impression en couleur à rotation symétrique a remplacé les plaques de taille-douce par des surimpressions et des plans transparents qui se chevauchent et qu’on rogne pour les mettre au carré. Avec des gabarits troués, je pulvérise du rouge, du jaune et du bleu primaires à travers des écrans pour créer des ombres de points Benday [« à la Lichtenstein »] sur des formes blanches qui, vues à distance, se fondent dans du gris. Mon travail s’est imprégné des phénomènes de l’empreinte et de la répétition, en dépit de la technique utilisée. Je presse des feuilles encrées, des cosses, des coquillages pour multiplier une image. Contrairement à la précision de la taille-douce et des écrans, je laisse maintenant les imperfections de l’impression manuelle rentrer dans ce qui compose la surface de mon assemblage. Je teste les limites de mon procédé, comme le sport ou la danse, en poussant plus loin dans l’invention. J’ai toujours eu la fascination de combiner différents médias, en particulier des sources inattendues qui confrontent le spectateur à une nouvelle façon de voir, mais où il accepte la pièce dans son ensemble. .................................. |
Exhibit Images  Judith Nelson "Portrait d'artiste" vue d'exposition  Judith Nelson "Portrait d'artiste" Vue d'exposition  Judith Nelson "Portrait d'artiste" Vue d'exposition  "Ziggurat", gravure, 46 x 46 cm,1969, n° 2/6   "The Berg Below", gravure, 46 x 46 cm, 1968, n° 5/6 (un exemplaire à la Library of Congress,Washington).  "Barometric Monument", gravure, 46 x 46 cm, n° 6/14  "Blue Shadow Rising", 46 x 43 cm, 1970,n° 8/10 (un exemplaire à la Potsdam State University of New York)  "Tondo Series Two", 1970, gravure, n°10/12  "Pink Bend", 1971, gravure, n°8/10, 46 x 46 cm  "Wheel Sea", 1967, gravure, n° 3/6, 38 x 46 cm (un exemplaire à laYale University)  "Primary Shift", 1968, gravure n° 5/10, 38 x 46 cm  "Generous House", 38 x 38 cm, 1967, gravure n° 3/4  "Big Red Hearted River", 38 x 46 cm, 1968, gravure, n° 12/15  "Flame Jab", 38 x 46 cm, 1967, gravure, n° 2/8  "The Arrival", 46 x 38 cm, 1969, gravure, n° 7/14  "Steam Heat", 38 x 46 cm, 1971, gravure, n° 10/16  "Bi Hop Flyte", 43 x 43 cm, 1972, artist proof (édition de 125 exemplaires à Honolulu Museum of Art).  "Axial Arch", 46 x 46 cm, 1970, gravure, n° 4/20  "Birthplace of the Flying Ice Cream Cone" 38 x 40,5 cm, 1972, gravure, n° 3/10  "Hot Sided Box", 48 x 46 cm, 1968, gravure, n° 4/10 |