JUSTINE FRISCHMANN
2016-03-21Frischmann straddles quite polarized worlds with the light she explores, having traversed the spotlight, the urban glare of media scrutiny, to the coastal light of the North Bay’s fog-mitigated ambience. Through the mix of oil paint, acrylic spray enamel, and repurposed photography, she balances urban and natural inferences, and captures an aura somewhere between limelight and inner light in the process.
Frischmann juxtaposes gesture and architecture, mass tone and translucence, improvisation and a considered physicality, all in the service of an art of threshold states. Rather than simply stacking the three media she employs, she shuffles them, with the fluorescent spray enamel acting as an arbitrator between the origami folds of her photo-based imagery and a fatty layer of high-valued oil paint. In the energy and immediacy of her gesture she achieves visual equivalencies for the punk ethic of London of the ‘90s, but she captures more than a simple equivalent of the tropes of an alternative social scene. The deep memory of painting as a medium pushes her work past fashion into the realm of what is perennial in the human condition, and mirror such basic building blocks as vulnerability and adaptation, loss and recovery, growth and discovery.
Opposite – Lambent #84 (cat. no. JUF021) 2016
Exhibition runs through till May 28th, 2016
George Lawson Gallery
315 Potrero Avenue (at 16th St.)
San Francisco
CA 94103
