These are perfect paintings. They’re like the sensation of when your eyes finally settle in a dark room. They emit a soft buzz. Pattern Esque but not following a pattern logic or rule they’re more of a field logic but with shifting depths, not unlike an auditory experience of thousands of chirping grasshoppers but less violent. They’re the size of large televisions or mini movie screens with a similar proportion but they provide more flicker.
I do love Seurat and Signac but although their pointillism was a stylistic breakthrough and there is a certain level of depth their paintings lack air. Air in paintings is one of the hardest things to talk about but when one sees it it’s undeniable. It’s an experience of the space between the physical eye and the “object”. Air, ether, atmosphere - these are words but the visual experience feels like something else. Part of it is a flickering, softer edges, not a rigid picture but something more fluid, hazier, not hard definitions but an openness to shifting barriers. Again these are just words. I find it very hard to verbalize air and it’s perceived and created qualities. Even though I can’t describe painted air - Andrew Forge’s paintings have It.
I particularly enjoy these paintings because they give me a similar visual sensation of when I stare at the sky. There’s an ungraspable spatial dynamic that can’t be defined or named. These paintings feel found, there’s not a definitive architecture or planned substratum. They feel stumbled upon but by a blind man who can see with his feet. In forge’s paintings few of the dots connect, they all huddle or mingle and rub shoulders. What’s extraordinary is through these clusters of perfectly interacting colors they create a rich and profound deep shifting space. Color magic at its finest.
These paintings aren’t massaged. The paint is matter of factly slapped on. The application can be seen as immediate or clumsy depending on how generous you’re feeling. You can see the raised mark of the paint and still almost hear the plucking it made getting beat off the brush onto the painting with a poke of the brush.
There’s not a finesse in layer or stroke or edge to create space and light instead these paintings rely solely on color dynamics and subtle bundle discernment’s of slight variations of dot size shape and it’s huddled or slightly overlapping relation to another color shape.
The more monochrome paintings don’t hold me but the pieces where Forge weaves violets, and yellows, pinks and greens to create mesmerizing foggy visual
homes are fascinating to travel through. “September 95-96” is one of these. It’s almost an after image in Bonnard’s retina after he spent all day painting his lover standing at her toilet. The palette continues on but the figure has faded. Phantom form and phantom objects dissolved into the pinholes of the eye created by millions of piercing shining light rays.
Do these pieces exist as observation? As a code from the rods and cones that are still being processed? Are they after images of when you close your eyes and face the sun, The light seen through your red fleshy eyelids but also something else?
In a way it doesn’t matter. They’re spontaneously orchestrated symphonies of visual phenomena that are a joy to experience. As long as our eyes can see they should be given gifts. Andrew Forge’s paintings are just that.
