exhibitions - debt
DEBT: Simon Gouverneur and Andy Moon Wilson
Saturday, January 15 - Saturday, February 12, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 15, 2011 6:30 – 8 pm
No, this exhibition is not about money. Rather, it is about the slippery terrain of artistic debt. In 2006, artist Andy Moon Wilson was introduced to the work of iconoclastic and abstract symbolist painter Simon Gouverneur, who had been based in Washington, DC for the last decade of his life prior to his suicide in 1990. Andy Moon Wilson has spent his artistic career exploring the infinite possibilities of visual design and ornament both as an artist and in his day job as a carpet designer. Simon Gouverneur also investigated global visual design motifs in his paintings and notebook sketches. Both artists share a fascination with archetypal abstracted forms that can communicate on both ethnographically specific and universal levels.
But there is where the similarities end. While Gouverneur intended a profound and rigorous spiritual engagement with his artwork, Moon Wilson rejects this spiritual quest in favor of an exploration of the intensely visual as it expresses itself both historically and, more importantly, in contemporary culture. Mostly, the artist just draws compulsively. But it is an intoxicating visual experience to present these two artists together. Gouverneur's two large paintings are flanked by Moon Wilson's hundreds of small intense works on paper.
Deeply mystical and intellectually challenging, Gouverneur's paintings function like mandalas for meditation. This exhibition features two of his rarely exhibited artworks: Naga - last exhibited in his solo exhibition at The Phillips Collection in 1985 -and Peyote II. Both use the zigzagging motif with completely different visual and psychological results. These paintings come from a time in Gouverneur's life during which he practiced an eclectic spiritual quest for enlightenment. He approached this quest intellectually by studying the sacred and esoteric traditions of diverse cultures and their visual expressions, such as Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism and Indian Vedic traditions. While in South America, he examined Pre-Columbian mythology, particularly as expressed in Mayan and Aztec stone calendars. He would later use the precise structures of these visual tropes in his paintings.
While Andy Moon Wilson's work owes a significant debt to mid-century Modernism and artists, like Gouverneur, who embraced modernism's lofty goals, he prefers to work from his vast repertory of pattern, design, and ornament. Minute and compact, Moon Wilson has described one of his goals as an artist as "wanting to make a drawing that will make a person throw up" from its visual intensity. Far more visceral and optically oriented, the artist follows and frequently transgresses the grid with his linear and rhythmic compositions. The works equally allude to architecture, military camouflage, cryptography, systems theory, sacred geometry, and pixelated computer imaging. He cites structured games of chance, the algorithms he uses in designing his carpets and especially game theory in developing the visual logic behind his work.
Moon Wilson writes, "Concepts from game theory, specifically those relating to biology and spontaneous pattern generation, are very important in my geometric/pattern-based work. I use colors or symbols as signifiers and assign them various behaviors. The drawings document their interaction with each other, as well as various external/environmental factors. Recently, I have begun to use not only individual colors/symbols interacting with other individuals, but also "molecules" or meta-patterns interacting with each other -- groups of individuals interacting with other groups -- that retain some of the characteristics of individual sub-components but generally act within behavioral parameters of a given molecule group."
Born in the Bronx in 1934, Gouverneur was an artist of Venezuelan and Afro-Caribbean heritage. He left home as a teenager to study at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of San Marcos in Italy. He received his M.F.A. at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. A worldly and learned artist, Gouverneur lived in New York, Los Angeles, Spain, Italy, Massachusetts, Colombia, Venezuela, and during the last decade of his life, Washington, DC. He exhibited his paintings internationally in Rome, Paris, Madrid, Zagreb, Palermo, Naples, Caracas, Calí, San Juan, PR, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amherst, Baltimore, McLean, Arlington, and Washington, DC. His paintings are in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; The Phillips Collection, DC; The Studio Museum, NY; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; the Museo La Tertulia, Calí; The DC Commission on the Arts; The Washington, DC Convention Center; The Brandywine Workshop, PA; Howard University, DC; the University of Massachusetts, MA; the University of Maryland, MD; Arnold & Porter, DC; The Washington, DC Convention Center, and the Artery Organization, MD.
Simon Gouverneur CV
Andy Moon Wilson is based in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his MA and MFA in drawing at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. As the featured artist at Curator's Office booth at the Scope New York Art Fair, he was singled out as one of the artists to watch in an article about the fairs in Art in America's May 2006 issue. He has had solo exhibitions at Get This! Gallery, Atlanta, GA; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA; the Greenbelt Art Center, Greenbelt, MD; the Byron Burford Gallery, Iowa City, IA; and the Dixon Eilers Gallery Storm Lake, IA. Group exhibitions include Get This Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Headbones Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Fuse Gallery, New York, NY; McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, VA; Koelsch Gallery, Houston, TX; Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, CA; The Union Gallery, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Scope Miami and Scope New York Art Fairs; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD; Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA; Tag Art Gallery, Nashville, TN; Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD; and the Ellipse Art Center, Arlington, VA. His work is currently in an international traveling group exhibition called "Draw" organized by Fuse Gallery in New York.
Andy Moon Wilson CV