MARK, PAPER, SCISSORS | May 1 - June 26, 2010

Jason Gubbiotti – Surface Tension
by
Elizabeth Fisher

There is a certain self-consciousness to Gubbiotti’s paintings. From a hip, retro-chic palette to the tongue-in-cheek titles or pseudo-architectural shapes that animate his images, careful layering within the work brings to bear a provocative set of cultural and aesthetic references.

Confident handling and sheer technical ability reveal solid foundations; Gubbiotti trained at the Corcoran and comes straight out of a strong tradition of abstract painting in D.C. that goes back to the 1960s. The part-by-part dissection of the processes and structures of painting that underpins Gubbiotti’s work echoes the methods of Robert Ryman or Frank Stella; at the same time, his soothing imagery recalls not an academic aesthetic but that of pop culture and consumerism, of design and fashion – references that weave an awareness of the contemporary cultural landscape into the formal fabric of his work.

In this latest group of paintings, the characteristic bubbles and clouds of color that scudded across Gubbiotti’s luscious surfaces have morphed into crisp-edged, angular shapes reminiscent of the aerial outlines of buildings, architectural footprints for connecting rooms, walkways, or planned urban spaces. Although they make no specific references to places, walk down any street and you’ll see Gubbiotti’s silhouettes all over the built environment - from balconies and stairways to office blocks and public parks. These new forms float over fields of ice-cream colors – lavender, tangerine or pewter – but now in tension with numerous (barely visible) ridges and recessed planes, outlines of previous edges and arrangements disrupting the smooth, even cover of the final layer of pigment. In as much as they are about the traceable sequence of decisions and gestures that made them, these paintings are also explicitly about space, represented and imagined, from pictorial to architectural space explored through the interplay of constructed volumes, planes, textures, and surfaces with light and color.

With every mark or staple, Gubbiotti underscores the essential objecthood of a painting. His bent, beveled and expanded stretchers, which require an elaborate and painstaking construction process, evolved with earlier works as part of an ongoing examination of the nature of the support to become emphatically architectural in their own right here. Volumes play off painted surfaces that embody both the physical, temporal history of a work-in-progress and the schematic precision of an architectural blueprint.

With these new works, Gubbiotti seems to be staking out a set of concerns that approaches the territory explored by a generation of painters that include Sarah Morris, Kevin Appel and Julie Mehretu, whose subject matter – the contemporary urban environment – is also implicated in the formal structure of the painting. Like these artists, Gubbiotti has developed an architectural lexicon that serves primarily as a formal device in his work, although the floating signifiers and abstractions that distinguish each artist’s imagery also retain vague traces of the cultural and ideological resonance of the physical structures they imitate; from the aesthetic rigor of modernist architects to the utopian aspirations of urban planners, an indelible history of ideas invested in form. Gubbiotti’s own engagement with the terms of abstraction – his experimental approach to form and composition, his concern for transparency and the issue of the surface – also resonates with the various aesthetic strategies of Mehretu, Morris and Appel, and points to a critical re-engagement with the legacies of modernism, from the contemporary urban environment to visual culture. In many ways, Gubbiotti also rekindles the spirit of modernism – as heroic and optimistic in its ambition as post-modernism is self-referential and hopelessly ironic.

It is in this last sense that Gubbiotti and his peers look afresh at the contemporary visual condition: seeing without context the overlapping sign systems and histories within the visual environment, the structure of spaces, perceptual fields and boundaries, and translating these with a sense of the mutability and multiplicity of temporalities, perspectival space and visual narratives into a new set of terms.

Elizabeth Fisher is currently the exhibitions officer at the Kettles Yard Art Gallery, Cambridge University, Cambridge England.