a curator's office in a micro gallery setting
at the micro gallery
Mystic Logic: Works from the Estate of Simon Gouverneur
Mystic Logic: Works from the Estate of Simon Gouverneur is an exhibition of four egg tempera and acrylic paintings and twenty-four never-before exhibited notebook sketches by this African-American/Latino artist (1934-1990). An opening reception is scheduled for Saturday, January 28 from 6:30 - 8 pm.
Simon Gouverneur was a critically acclaimed abstract symbolist painter who attracted much attention in Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, Amherst, MA; Caracas, Venezuela; Calí, Colombia; Paris, France; and Naples and Palermo, Italy -- cities that he lived and worked in. Gouverneur committed suicide in December 1990 in his Washington, DC-based studio on Florida Avenue.
View exhibition
Gouverneur pursued a lifelong investigation into the structures of language and meaning. His erudite hard-edge abstract paintings incorporate a personal lexicon of images and symbols culled and abstracted from world cultures, religions, and sacred practices. Deeply mystical and intellectually challenging, the paintings function like mandalas for meditation. His work invokes a wide range of ideas--from the principles of structural anthropology espoused by Claude Levi- Strauss to the teachings of Jewish mysticism, Buddhist texts and linguistic theories. Gouverneur's gridded compositions and use of saturated colors reveal a preoccupation with how structured design and aesthetic media could convey the many layers of complex meanings that he constructed by his combinations of visionary and iconic symbols. He evolved his iconography and design schema from Central and South American aesthetics. He was not a prolific artist, choosing rather to execute meticulously one painting for several months. He ground his pigments and mixed his own egg tempera paints in his studio that evoked a Faustian study.
About his dense and unique notebook sketches, artist, critic, and independent curator J.W. Mahoney writes: "The wide range of free and controlled marks throughout these notebook sheets evidence the restless ferocity of what was constantly a two-way conversation with systems of order far beyond the personal.
Along with instinctively symbolic workings-out of number and language scaffoldings, other alternative designs appeared, such as variations on the cruciform or images traditional to South American tribal mysticism, such as frogs or scorpions. These are educated dialogues emerging from both a working knowledge of linguistics and from a rationalized impact of transcendent information. Gouverneur’s greater philosophical spectrum embraces foundational Marxist theory to South American psychotropics. Converting these kinds of data honestly into art is as beautiful as possibly incomprehensible."
In his life, Gouverneur's work was often respected yet dismissed by collectors and art dealers because it was deemed too intellectual or mystical. On the other hand, many artists, curators and writers considered Gouverneur an artist's artist. His visionary and idiosyncratic vision was unable to be pigeonholed conveniently into any fashionable artistic discourse in the irony-filled 1980s, a phenomenon that frustrated him greatly. Still, he refused to compromise his principles and continued to create the distinctive works that are on view in this exhibition and available through his estate.
View available estate works
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, and Washington, DC.
Read artist's CV
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 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 as well as numerous other public and private collections.
A curatorial text about the notebook sketches by J.W. Mahoney, one of Gouverneur’s closest friends, accompanies the show. A full-color 48-page catalog, Icon Culture: The Late Paintings of Simon Gouverneur, published by McLean Project for the Arts in conjunction with a traveling exhibition in 2000 is also available. It includes essays by Dan Cameron, Curator-At-Large, New Museum, New York, NY; J.W. Mahoney, artist, critic, and independent curator, Washington, DC; and Andrea Pollan, Director, Curator's Office, Washington, DC.
Read the Washington Post review by Michael O'Sullivan
Read Artforum Magazine's Critics' Pick review by Nord Wennerstrom
Read the Washington Post review by Jessica Dawson
Read the Washington City Paper review by Jeffry Cudlin