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ARTCAT



Kevin Zucker, Search Within Results

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery
730 Fifth Avenue, 212-445-0444
Midtown
January 18 - March 3, 2007
Reception: Thursday, January 18, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site


Search Within Results features five large-scale paintings made using a combination of digital technology and traditional methods, as well as three medium-sized photographs and a set of works on paper (all dated 2006). As can be inferred from the exhibition title, much of the content and imagery in Zucker’s recent work has to do with systems for archiving, storage and display, often on the internet. The largest work in the show, Encyclopedia, depicts a repository for all the free CAD models available online. Downloaded from various databases (intended for commercial use in video game design, architectural rendering, and production/ fabrication), these models are often either “generic- intended to be useful to the largest number of consumers” or “absurdly specific and most likely useful to no one at all.” Zucker arranges these `objects’ within an architecture composed of the metal shelving units common to every garage, basement, and commercial storage facility. The artist presents to us what he calls “a museum of a moment in the development of a technology and a culture”, a collection of archetypes that exist as models first, with the potential to be brought into being in the actual world.

Zucker also plays with the physical construction of recent paintings, cutting and splicing compositions into shards and re-arranging and abstracting them. Paintings such as CMYK (error type 25) and Red, Yellow, Blue (error type 108) have a three-dimensional presence which is further complicated by the use of perspective, gesture and texture. Flat Planes of the basic printing (and primary) colors of cyan/magenta/yellow/black (red/yellow/blue) alternately foil and enhance the illusion of deep space. As with the imagery, Zucker presents us with a visual language that is simultaneously real and artificial, hand-made and mechanical, that takes place in the past, present and future – all coming together and falling apart at the same time.

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