Houston — Free Fall & Factual Facts

Gerardo Rosales: Looking for a Hero, or, Whips, Whims, and Wigs, and Gio Ponti is just an excuse

Orange and red tears fall from the eyes of the girl, their shapes morphing into inverted hearts, buttocks, amoeba. If we imagine them as metal (as the title would suggest), their hard surfaces are pocked with intricately circling indentations. Perhaps these tears are diseased, perhaps filled with seed. And yet, despite her steadily flowing tears, many larger than her head, our protagonist seems calm. She may be levitating, her short, pink legs ending in white lace socks and black shoes like those a child might wear to her first communion. Her white dress is frilled, scalloped, gathered, puffed. She might actually be a floating confection.

Laura AugustMay 7, 2019Gerardo Rosales, Transart Foundation, Houston

Darren Waterston: Eventide

Channeling the specters and emotions that permeate landscape, Waterston’s new paintings create an unsteady and tenuous world. He paints dream-states and twilight, the moments at which daylight and darkness touch. “Eventide suggests the liminal in-between states both in dreams and twilight. Gossamer shapes and shadows emerge; playful chimera, phantoms and ghost-like forms occupy watery landscapes and celestial realms,” Waterston writes. “The paintings often juxtapose fastidiously painted representation up against loose, viscous gestures, stains, and abrasions.”

Laura AugustJanuary 2, 2019Darren Waterston, Houston

Jim Richard: I Know a Place

In his deft mixing of 'high' and 'low' cultural imagery, Richard has always looked to invisible spaces, often playfully considering the role of art within such quotidian concerns. Since the early 1990s, when he shifted from painting in acrylic to oil paint, Richard's work has engaged the push-pull between Modernism and its environs. Now, working in the velvety matte surface of Flashé vinyl paints, Richard takes the conventions of paint-by-number to paint yards and gardens, each in a single color family: he paints Afternoon in rosy pinks and mauves, Cool Breeze in a range of green hues. As the Village Voice notes, Richard is adept at "channeling [a] sense of anxiety about what, exactly, constitutes art, once all the rules are in flux."

Laura AugustJune 1, 2018Jim Richard, Houston, Gardens

Tommy Fitzpatrick: Factual Facts and Actual Facts

Containers or structures split apart and fracture, their walls resting on each other, mirroring themselves, and angling into the suggestion of other spaces in Tommy Fitzpatrick's newest paintings. At once citing architectural forms--the paintings are called Aedicule, Bascule, Monolith, Pavilion--and invoking the entrance of the figure, Fitzpatrick teases our sureness of where we are, what we know, and how we see. What happens if the walls our senses try to describe become transparent, reflective, or unstable? Looking to Josef Albers's lectures on color and perception, Fitzpatrick alludes to a contemporary moment in which even seemingly stable knowledge is called into question. "In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is — as it physically is," Albers writes in his 1963 experimental guide Interaction of Color, "In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”

Laura AugustJune 1, 2018Tommy Fitzpatrick, Houston, Facts