Making Good Time: Richard Garrison and Alexander Oleksyn

Richard Garrison and Alexander Oleksyn

Brooklyn, NY — May 15, 2017 — Making Good Time explores different ways of marking time and features one new painting each by two artists, Richard Garrison and Alexander Oleksyn. Both artists’ work display time as a linear experience, one color or one mark after another and at the same time each painting represents the totality of the time it took to make it.  Both paintings record a path…Garrison’s path of life’s mundane errands; a calendar in color of ubiquitous activities and Oleksyn’s the path of his brush guided by intense concentration; an artifact of a meditation.

Richard Garrison’s Parking Space Color Schemes are a collection of colors derived from an archive of photographs of the asphalt of every parking space he parked his car.  After collecting the images for a given period of time Garrison matches the colors in the photos in paint on canvas from the first parking space his automobile occupied to the to last space, in this painting a year and a half beginning in January 2014 through May 2015.  The resulting grid of blacks, grays and muted colors in this photo-based chronology are naturally effected by the time of day and year, and therefore the light, each photograph is taken. Through a process of careful scientific-like scrutiny we can trace Garrison’s daily errands. He dissects and restructures these images into a calendar of color variations with a Hanne Darboven-like analytical quantification and qualification of a generic American consumer experience. This deconstruction of a quotidian experience is a personal, non-judgmental, examination of the visual, emotional and conceptual aspects of consumerism.

Alexander Oleksyn’s meticulously crafted, meditative line paintings originate from his desire to make a painting whose drama comes from the speed the line is drawn, in his case, a very slow line.  Each composition begins in one corner and continues slowly, methodically in a single non-overlapping line until the surface is covered, resulting in a series of black and white paintings with a clear beginning and end to the creative process. Each painting titled the date that it is finished. These self-evident compositions, determined by their time of execution, simplicity of composition and straightforward use of materials (the quality of the paint, the size of the brush, etc.) fulfill in Oleksyn a need for painting with more intentionality. “It is important that the compositions are self-evident, meaning that how they are defined turns to a large extent on how they are made.”  For Making Good Time, Oleksyn will create a site-specific painting in acrylic on the wall of the gallery.

Set opposite each other on opposing walls of the gallery both artists’ paintings take us in different directions and offer us different views on the nature of time. Richard Garrison’s scientific-like categorization and ridged grid of colors transforms the mundane ugliness of asphalt into colors referential to time, place and travel. Alexander Oleksyn’s meditations on transparency, materials and process are a metaphorical path in time painstakingly plotted in paint and folded introspectively onto themselves.