PHILIP GERSTEIN: IN THE INTERVAL
EXHIBITION DATES: JANUARY 30 – FEBRUARY 24, 2024
RECEPTION: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 5PM – 8PM
The Painting Center is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Philip Gerstein titled In the Interval in the Project Room. This exhibition highlights selections from his post-minimal series of paintings, following Gerstein’s previous solo show at The Painting Center in 2017, at the start of this series.
The intervals in painting serve as a potent organizational device, while their impact can go well beyond a simple principle of compositional arrangement, to affect our emotive and even vibrational response.
What makes this device have a particularly strong impact in Gerstein’s paintings is his paired use of intervals and color, to establish the emotional field of each picture. It is precisely the vitality and ambiguity that comes from color that allows Gerstein’s paintings to be seen as transcending the dualism of our language and expression — that restriction of thinking (& painting) within the binding confines of object/ground, dark/light, thick/thin, shiny/matte, solid/nebulous, hard/soft, textured/smooth, clear/unfocused, and ultimately, real/illusory.
Of note is also his paintings’ commitment to unrepeatability, where each painting is allowed to follow its own path, its own inner calling, resulting in a panoply of surface impressions and outcomes — like musical compositions performed with a different combination of instruments, each small difference is progressively magnified as the composition develops.
Upon a longer look, one might even contend that Gerstein pushes his use of intervals much further, into the realm of metaphor, perhaps even an illustration of universal principles. Ultimately, it is the pulsing, the barely perceived vibration of everything around us… the very light that allows us to see coming in in packets, in pulses between substance & void… it is the pulse of the universe… It is what all matter, all material objects around us are made of, the pulses of more or less congealed, solidified energy. And within this revealed pulsing, the old object/ground painting conundrum is being resolved in the clarity of the interval — in each stroke’s surroundings, in the contradiction of the abstract nature of color interacting with the concrete nature of object, and the acceptance of this radical ambiguity.
Philip Gerstein was born and raised in the USSR. His home and studio are in Boston, MA. His paintings are frequently shown in NYC and New England, where he also curates painting and photography shows. His writing on art appears monthly in Scene4 International Magazine of Arts and Culture.
For more information about the artist, visit: www.philipgerstein.com
