Back in the Swinging Sixties, Washington was home to a collection of artists who were dubbed forerunners of abstract, color field painting. As an integral part of this season’s ColorField.remix, a visitation of the legacy left behind by the Washington Color School painters, Hemphill Fine Arts presents a three-artist exhibition: Jason Gubbiotti’s Wrong Way to Paradise; Leon Berkowitz’s The Cathedral Series; and Portia Munson’s Pink Project: Contained.
Although Jason Gubbiotti currently lives and works in France, he is no stranger to the District or the famed school of artists that precedes him. Gubbiotti’s crisp-edged shapes and lush surfaces put in mind a birds-eye view of imaginary buildings, flat amphitheaters, sinkholes, cobblestone pathways, basins, and pastures represented by dewily laid (but never waterlogged) planes of color. These geometric bins of color are architectural visualizations — tender topography built out into the air, with triple-layered, gelatin surfaces that make you want to lick them until you get to their gooey centers.
The palette of Wrong Way to Paradise is so varied that you imagine Gubbiotti thumbing through an infinite number of color samples, and it seems as if he hasn’t overlooked any tube of paint or combination. His materials vary broadly as well. Exposed wood grain of a panel becomes a color field in itself; he uses MDF board over here and, oh wait, the actual gallery wall over there.
Bees Do It Too, applied directly to the wall, is perhaps the most reminiscent of landscape design. His Crayola-green color fields become illusory grasslands of a professional-league golf course. Traditional Sunset Circumcision (pictured above), which the artist lovingly refers to as “the baby poop painting,” has all the best qualities of a picture. A connoisseur of color theory, capitalizing on the subtleties of a touch of red or a speck of blue, Gubbiotti brews the most complex, drunkard greens and pairs them with a hot foreskin focal point of pink and scarlet.
Photos courtesy of Hemphill Fine Arts.
