CLINTON KING

Fascinated by the amount of information a single, loaded brushstroke can convey, King’s abstract paintings emphasize a minimalist approach that distils painting to its essential elements. The artist layers graphical, gradient strokes of resonant colors to achieve intricate but powerful visual effects, with every mark borrowing from, responding to, and guiding the next in a painterly dialogue. This vibrant network of patterns documents and celebrates King’s intuitive approach to painting, which rejects preconceived ideas and strict delineations, instead focusing on the natural progression of the work. The paintings, favoring associative and narrative possibilities, showcase the artist’s investigation of the relationship between order and disorder and the tangible and abstract.

The gestural brushwork that animates the works in Mythmatics pushes abstraction to new levels of visual intensity and draws the eye into atmospheric spaces that are unique to each composition. Employing a plethora of vivid hues, from electric blue and neon pink to acid green and flaming yellow, works such as Dead Heat (under dark red) and Milkmaid Revelation __pulse with a vibrating, bold energy. The experience is abruptly transporting: the large-scale canvases swathed with densely overlapping strokes envelop the viewer in a captivating prismatic dimension. In King’s more sparsely populated compositions, such as Prime Ordeal and Iridule (Arch), interweaving brushstrokes generate intricate images that invite the eye to wander, to follow the lines through the labyrinth in an intuitive search for Ariadne’s thread. In contrast to the paintings that are driven by accumulation, Grounded Phosphene seems to move in the opposite direction. Here, King’s signature vibrant strokes are pared down to two diagonals and an ellipse; the concise composition leaves no room for the superfluous. Opaque, crisp brushstrokes contrast with layers of gauzy veils that invite the viewer into a diaphanous dreamworld. From dense, kaleidoscopic stratification to vaporous fields of color, King’s broad spectrum of mark-making serves as a guide to unknown territories, offering simultaneously dramatic and intimate experiences.

The works on view in Mythmatics—a portmanteau combining “mythology” and “mathematics”—exemplify the artist’s distinct abstract lexicon, which defies the constraints of descriptive analysis. While King does not specify a precise interpretation for his works, he believes in their potential for metaphysical or symbolic meaning. The artist’s restless reinvention of the painted plane continues to break new ground through the use of broad, sweeping strokes that tacitly ignore the medium’s physical limits, implying that the image extends far beyond the canvas and is part of a much larger expanse.

Press Release: Courtesy of MAKI