Vanishing Points: Saul Becker, Marti Cormand, Steve Robinson; Alex Ross, curator    Apr 30 - Jun 6, 2010

(Santa Fe, NM) Instituted as an accelerator of art and culture, LewAllen Projects is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition, Vanishing Points. Testing traditions while seeking more adequate understandings of a changing world, the project presents works by three New York-based painters who evince a simultaneous commitment to and complication of the landscape genre. Technologically-mediated representations of nature in contemporary mass media continue to erode the primacy of ground-level observations of natural phenomena in crystallizing individual subjectivities. Addressing this modality, the exhibition takes as its central focus artworks that deterritorialize the aesthetics of the virtual from the conformational sway of mass communications.

Acknowledging the role of landscape painting as an index of social attitudes connoting a culture's relationship to its surrounding environments, the exhibition also communicates a critical response to modes of pictorial representation that perpetuate simulacra of an ubiquitous pristine. Attuned to histories of destructive spatial practices, and reacting to regimes of symbolic control that equate the seductive beauty of "virgin" sites with an impetus for industrial and touristic expansion, the selection of included artworks has been guided by a desire to interrogate the escalating dissemination of images that emblematize the use value of the picturesque.

To this purpose, the exhibition presents works that infect the practices and subject matter of traditional scenic painting with artifacts of computer-driven processes¡ªsuggesting linkages between the entropic agencies of informational excess and ecological decay. Undercutting normative trends of visual purification while underscoring the increasingly digital texture of our world, Vanishing Points relays new aesthetic formations responding to pivotal shifts in the appearance and distribution of our landscape.

In a distinctly twenty-first century reevaluation of the expectations of landscape painting, Saul Becker's elegiac scenes of a crumbling industrialism rupture established conventions of representation. Generating compound images from digital photographs of disparate sites surrounding his Brooklyn studio, the artist engages with the appropriative and recombinatory impulses prevalent in contemporary visual modes. The various manipulations essential to this process result in a degradation of the data that endows his works with visual asperities recalling surveillance footage and video game animation; their only evidence of autographic gestures appears in unsanctioned graffiti scrawled on rocks and eroded barricades. The abrupt foregrounds of his paintings are littered with the refuse of deteriorating roadside barriers, collapsed concrete pipelines, and the wreckage of foundations ¨C memorializing the physical ruin and delusive optimism that inheres to the modern promise of limitless boundaries. Offering no utopian promises, and forcing our immersion in an alien landscape more virtual than real, Becker's reminders of the proliferation of technological seeing deny the potential for a non-mediated field of vision. Born in Tacoma, Washington in 1975, Saul Becker received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Design and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the recipient of the prestigious Virginia Museum of Art Fine Art Fellowship in 2005 as well as the Washington State Arts Award and numerous additional grants and honors. His work has been exhibited in solo projects at Artists Space and Volta NY and received critical approbation in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2009. Becker lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Drawing a parallel between ecological degradation and the disappearance of the analog, Marti Cormand presents a parable for the encroachments of the digital on the practice of contemporary painting. Polychromatic interruptions resembling scrambled bytes of data infiltrate his painstakingly rendered landscapes in a symbolic distillation of form and color that exposes the structures concealed beneath superficial levels of perception. These networks of sutures and skeletal lattices allude simultaneously to the tradition of linear perspective, the modernist grid, and the pixel-based digitization of contemporary technological seeing. By basing his paintings upon anonymous web images and denying any indicators of precise physical or temporal space, the artist ensures persistent doubts as to the referential veracity of his compositions. the artist's engagement in the process of appropriation demands a partial relinquishment of authorial control that underscores the ineluctable mediation and delusive qualities of contemporary artistic practice. By manipulating the language of landscape painting, Cormand undercuts the vaunted tropes of the sublime and implicates the artist in perpetuating misrepresentations of a heroic, idealized nature. Marti Cormand completed his MFA at the University of Barcelona and has been showing his paintings internationally since 1998. In 2007 he received the Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and has been honored by grants from the Catalonia Department of Culture and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Born in 1970 in Barcelona, Spain, the artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Steve Robinson's renderings of the late 15th century temple rock garden at Ry¨­an-Ji explore the nature of representation in the post-industrial era. Manipulating the tension between mechanical and gestural visual modes, and conflating the spaces of digital production with the conventions of traditional representation, the artist creates a schism in the apparent continuity of the art historical narrative. Never having visited the garden, and deriving his source material from web-sourced tourist photographs, he exploits mass culture's exhibitionism while examining the potentiality and limitations of depicting a place known only through pre-existing representations. Subjected to a rigorous process of digital filtration, his source images are reduced to pixilated areas of randomized color. Reversing the traditional relationship between the industrial and the handmade, their reproduction as paintings is determined by the boundaries of computer-generated stencils. The inevitable mistranslations and erosions of data resultant to multiple complications, as well as Robinson¡¯s intentional recombination of dissimilar viewpoints, question the ability of the final data to convey an authentic experience of place. Born in Philadelphia, and currently residing in Brooklyn, Robinson received his B.F.A. from Cornell University and his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Fine Art. His work has been exhibited in numerous public and private venues internationally.