The Proposition gallery proudly presents, “Various states of undress, construction and repair,” Jason Gringler’s solo premiere New York City exhibition opening Saturday, April 19th and on display until May 21st. The gallery is very pleased to have Gringler as a new addition to the roster and has previously shown his work in the group exhibition “Gothic Intrusion,” as well as “The Unnameable”, a collaborative show with Martin Kuchar, both in March 2008.

Leaving Toronto for New York, Gringler has aggressively appropriated the industrially manufactured materials that reflect the gritty surroundings of his new neighborhood in Brooklyn for this series of paintings that comprise “Various states of undress, construction and repair”.

Previously, Gringler’s work consisted of a vastly varied palette of vibrant colors and muted tones amongst softer lines and fluidly curvilinear shapes. His earlier paintings were much smaller in scale, mostly asymmetrical and featured a lustrous resin finish. While Gringler continues to strongly favor the urban backdrop of gray, silver and black with this new series of paintings, his controlled flourishes of color now have a more strategic sense in their placement and are also very instrumental in creating a sharper contrast throughout each piece.

At first glance, Gringler’s new paintings look very geometrical in design and architecturally structured with many hard right angles and crisp straight lines that fracture at and point toward the vertical axis. Each piece is created with two identically sized adjoining panels that connect at the center; however, the seemingly symmetrical halves never quite mirror one another. Instead, most of the shapes are slightly offset from being perfectly placed opposite their logical counterpart, in effect, leading the eye all across the surface with the hope of finding a balance, yet remaining unsuccessful due to the unending gravitational pull around the frame. The very fact that the works are oriented on a diamond-esque (forty-five degree) tilt rather than parallel to the ground draws attention to the sharpness of the corners and more than likely contributes to the near vertigo inducing movement already originating within the dynamic multidirectional arrangement in each composition.

Gringler constructs these paintings in a manner so that the transparency of the Plexiglas surface exposes the underlying structure of the wooden support frame, not to mention the surface behind it. Upon this, he layers spray paint and amorphous splashes of acrylic paint with angular strips of acrylic sheets, mirror and Plexiglas. The final element is the environment. As each piece is hung and situated in a space, its partially mirrored surface reflects the architecture of the very environment that the painting inhabits, making it an essential and inevitable component to the piece itself.

Addressing the process behind “Various states of undress, construction and repair,” Gringler offers, “Each work acts much like the pages of a sketchbook. I build ideas one on top of the next, from painting to painting, reiterating the importance of construction in my studio practice. The structures change slowly, as if each work is one step closer to a complete, and culturally reflective, language.”