McKenzie Fine Art: Don Voisine 2021 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642

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	Don Voisine May 14 - June 27, 2021
	Don Voisine is well known for refined and reductive abstract paintings that explore architectonic and sculptural space. Working in oil on wood panels, with occasional additions of acrylic, Voisine sets simple geometric forms against light and black fields, flanked by bands of contrasting color, either left and right or top and bottom. In earlier paintings, the forms generally overlapped; in this new body of work, geometric shapes often lay adjacent to one another or nest within a larger form, such as a rectangle set within a parallelogram that appears to extend past the edge of the painting. In some compositions, the spatial movement is more emphatically lateral, recalling strategies the artist explored in much earlier work. Voisine differentiates forms using gloss versus matte surfaces and by directional brushwork. In some paintings, contrasting near-variants of a color cause bisected shapes to appear folded or bent, moving forward or receding into space. Wedge shapes play a more dominant role in the current work; previously they entered only partially into the pictorial space from the perimeters. Now, bladelike forms punctuate the space more forcefully, and in some works appear to bend forward or back, flipping up or down, as if snipped and folded like cut metal. Also new are expansive white fields containing smaller discreet geometries, rectangles and wedges resting adjacent or overlapping with a gentle pulsation, as the color progresses from light to dark. The works are particularly suggestive of architectural drawings, urban topographies, and aerial views. Voisine’s color choices are notably vibrant in this body of work, with rich purples, deep reds and oranges, cool greens and bright blues, along with a seemingly infinite variety of blacks. No matter the scale, whether 12 inches square or nearly 7 feet wide, Voisine’s paintings feel monumental and dramatic, their surfaces taut and sensuously severe. Despite restricting himself to a reductive geometric vocabulary, Voisine has created an impressive and wide-ranging pictorial exploration into form, color, and space. Don Voisine has been exhibiting his paintings nationally and internationally in gallery and museum shows for well over forty years. His paintings and works on paper are in the permanent collections of museums across the United States and in Germany. In June, Voisine’s work will be featured in Break + Bleed at the San Jose Museum of Art and will be seen later in the summer in the traveling exhibition, Multilayer, in Germany and beyond. Voisine’s exhibitions have been reviewed extensively, in such publications as Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Art in America, Artcritical, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among many others.