DARLA BJORK
Dawn Paintings: Internal Landscape: Recent Paintings
Darla Bjork's second exhibition, Dawn Paintings: Internal Landscape,
at SOHO20 Chelsea Gallery will feature a suite of square oil paintings
ranging in size from 22 to 48. The exhibit with its muted tones and
layering of dripped paint is a meditation on open space, landscape,
and light.
The paintings celebrate the generosity of nature, the luminescence
of sunrise and sunset. With this work, Bjork finds the sensuous abandon
possible in the act of painting and the clarity manifest through such
abandon--a liberation of the self possible through artistic creation.
Bjork works on the edge, playing with revelation and concealment,
light and shadow--the chance of catching a glimpse, the chance of
another understanding (of the self). Resisting boundaries, she dares
abandon, her painting has become expansive, even as it pushes against
the picture plane and moves beyond the canvas edge into the viewer's
space, explosive. She courts chaos, but her vision is now unmasked
and chaos is reformulated--freedom, space, fluidity--the layering
of sumptuous color and red-golden light.
In this celebration of a lyrical relation with the natural world,
the act of painting, becomes for Bjork, the reach for a utopian ideal.
Bjork works to reconcile structure with expansiveness, "it has
to be both," luminescence and the dark of the sun. Light filters through
layers of color, and color becomes light. The gesture of the artist's
hand, is at once brushstroke and ray of light, a particular moment
of sunset and a record of freedom and expansiveness--the opening of
the artist's psyche.
Flavia Rando Ph.D.
Exhibition Catalog 2004
Join the artist at the reception on Thursday, September 9, 2004 from
6-8PM.
