Terrain Vague | David Lefkowitz

Lefkowitz, who serves as Professor of Art at Carleton College, has work in numerous collections in the U.S. and Europe, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany, and the Perez Museum of Art Miami.

Included in this exhibition will be a new series of pseudo-landscapes on panel. About this new work, Lefkowitz writes:

“This series of paintings depict invented views of ever-present but frequently overlooked segments of the landscapes we inhabit- empty lots, highway medians, abandoned industrial sites- non spaces without a name or a claim as property. The term ‘Terrain Vague’ was coined by Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales to draw attention to what usually goes unseen and encourage a reconsideration of our relationship to place.

Moving from background to foreground, the paintings all start with grounds of poured latex that mimic both organic topographic features and Modernist action process painting initiated by Jackson Pollock and extended by Morris Louis and others. The color palette suggests an image of the earth seen out an airplane window through atmospheric haze, and is made entirely of ‘mistinted’ paint abandoned at hardware stores. These grounds are meant to feel both arbitrary and inevitable, like one’s encounter of the layers of geologic history in a roadcut along a highway, or for that matter any fragment of the observed natural landscape. Yet, ironically, they are made out of the literal residue of an industrial process. Mechanically produced, organically applied.

Instead of emphasizing the flatness of the surface and the primacy of the material and act of application though, these layers serve as the literal ‘grounds’ for topographical or representational features. Many include a network of sharply defined lines that occupy the middle ground. These suggest the imposition of a rigid geometric structure that designates an articulation of space. This layer refers both to symbols for roads in a standard atlas, and the assertive framework of Constructivist design or Mondrian’s utopian grids viewed from a raking angle, that birds-eye view again that contextualizes and spatializes the apparent chaos of the underlying surface.

The ‘figure’ or foregrounded layer consists of deadpan, aggressively yet clunkily literal depictions of ancillary features, both natural and human-made, of our surroundings- hedgerows, concrete barriers, traffic cones, utility structures – the type of elements basic to the infrastructure we rely on but never consider as worthy of contemplation.”

This exhibition will show concurrently with Curio, featuring new work by Dan Bruggeman.