Multimedia artist Richard Garet of Uruguay and painter Venuz White of Colombia explore the limits of their media —video and poured acrylic paint, respectively— to depict visionary worlds of heightened color and light and of ambiguously scaled natural form.

Garet’s Time Frame digital prints go beyond the idea of photographing manufactured imagery or setups; they capture imagery that is completely illusive or virtual: the radiantly colored geometric imagery from the artist’s hypnotically kinetic abstract films. Garet selects frames from the sequence suggestive of change and progression within stasis and edits ands retouches them in the computer. The finished images, mounted beneath Plexiglas, seem suspended in time, awaiting liberation, yet glowing and breathing —doors or windows affording viewers glimpses onto an ethereal, effulgent landscape of prismatic, spiritualized color — Turner and Rothko re-imagined for the electronic age. In Cell 5, bands of radiant blue, green and orange conjure an idealized and symbolically simplified landscape; other pieces have jazzy neon palettes. In their transparent intricacy, and with certain areas blurred (caught in motion) or shaded to appear in low relief, they also suggest schematic diagrams animated by light and color and seen through some mystical X-ray. In their compression of time, these photographs echo Cubism; in their implied movement, they recall Op Art.

Richard Garet Cell 5, 2007. C-print on Duraphlex on Plexiglas, 18"x12"

White’s Dot Project paintings, in contrast, focus on the organic. Using acrylic paint of varying viscosities and densities, the artist tilts the canvases or MDF panels to let gravity and the physical properties of the pigment control the generation of imagery, rather like Morris Louis with his florals and veil in the 1960s, or Pollock with his drips and skeins in the 1950s. Covered with eccentrically shaped color patches that seem to ooze and flow like sap, lava, or the tides, White’s images resemble organic maps or quilts. Some of the zones bear rippled patterns (reminiscent of the decorated end papers in old books) that seem to be sliding off the canvas. Others contain hundreds of multicolored dots (achieved with an eyedropper) resembling the eyespots on a peacock’s tail, or the concentric rings of Venetian millefiori glass, and they, too seem to be caught in glacially slow motion. We seem to be looking not down, but across and into objects. Inner Nature 3 fuses the downward growth of roots into soil with the painterly drip — both related to the search for sustenance, whether as agent or effect or by-product. One writer saw “cellular membranes” in these paintings and described them as “penetrating nature’s epidermis.” White’s microcosmic and/or macrocosmic paintings, made in collaboration with her medium, achieve Art Nouveau rhythm and style, and imbue them with hallucinatory intensity.

Venuz White Inner Nature 3, 2007. Acrylic on MDF, 23.6x23.6"

The work of Richard Garet and Venuz White will be on view at Gallery 415 through October 27th.