Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

Other Architecture
Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE
Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION
Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS
Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION
Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION
Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE
Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE
Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."
Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Ceramic Constructions : Fired Surfaces/Architectural Forms supporting Hidden Interiors.

 

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours : About philosophy/drawing

 Outpost Studio 261021

On the property/structure of things/materials/colours

Drawings going beyond figure/ground relationships

The manifestation of weight derives from form along with substance.

I no longer wanted to make markings on a piece of paper, I wanted to make the drawing integral to its structure and properties.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Serra has questioned whether his 'Deadweight' series borders on the pictorial, because these drawings set two similar shapes against a common ground as if to construct a compound figure. However Serra's use of overlap protects against this possibility and preserves the material independence of the two sheets of paper.

Preface, Being and Becoming. C. Robert Mesle.

The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. James Taylor

Process-Relational Philosophy. 

An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. 2008

The assumption of a moving viewer, Richard Serra in a Japanese Temple Garden.

Richard Serra believes that the physical grasp of a space must occur through time in the form of movement or effort, so he temporally extends his own working of a surface.

Tempered, measured movement such as the application of layers of paintstick, narrows the conceptual gap between the space and time we imagine to experience bodily.

Serra's program  (a temporal art of substance), to link bodily consciousness to material substance, to integrate vision and touch as well as space and time.

Movement/Sensation marks both space and time, it does so psychologically as well as physically.

The Interaction Of Color

Albers theorized the relation of space and time to weight.

The two basic quantities or substances question, how much and how often, distinguishes two kinds of quantities, one of size, extension in area, and one of recurrence, an extension in number. These measurements establish weight in space and weight in time.

Serra's accumulated, living movement, his layering of paintstick, collects weight in space and weight in time.

The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.

The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.

The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.

The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.

When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.

The human body can move external bodies in many ways, and dispose them in many ways.

The human mind is apt for perceiving many things, and more so according as its body can be disposed in more ways.

Bento de Spinoza : Ethics, Part II, Postulates I-VI, Proposition XIV

Bento,s Sketchbook : John Berger. 2011

Manuel Neri

Bodies of intensity, imprinted with a ghostly figural outline.

Sculptures and drawings showing ambivalence,hostile, intimate, relationships.

The contradictory shocks between form and substance are absorbed by the emotional resilience of the dialectic of pleasure and doubt. Neri proves this in the course of his own work, through his successive approaches to different materials, which make him oscillate between allusive figuration and the most direct realism.

Pierre Restany. 1988

How do things translate into lived experience?

Whatever the answer, it will be known only in relation to the particularity of a personal physical encounter with the work, never as a principle of order or composition.

Drawing Thick, Richard Serra.

Agencies/ways of doing, phenomena and research emerge with specific relationalities to things at hand.

A diffractive methodology is a knowledge making process, creating ongoing differences, states of being/becoming.

Diffraction as a tool for analysis, attunes us to the differences generated by our knowledge.

Opening up ways for greater sensitivity towards how we are part of the worlds continuous becoming.

Organism-Person-Environment : The Architectural Body.

Arakawa and Gins 

The theoretical object/body in doing/sensate built architecture

Living Spaces : Spatial Agencies/Creative Philosophies into a world of continual process and becoming, where each person relates to every other and to all of nature.

Architectural Thinking/The Interrelated Universe : Process and Reality

Mattering : Mind-Movement-Material

Spatial Interventions in Architecture

Filtered Light and the interactions of objects

Entanglements of Materials and Substances

Asperities, opacities, reflections, textiles,

Lines Of Flight : Drawing on Mattering

Steven Holl, House,St Ignatius, Scale

Place Making/Drawing/Materials/Construction

Beach Ruins : Belgium

Rutile/Yellow Ochre washes, transparent glass/glaze, texture/textile and pierced clay/concrete.

Ceramic Slab Constructions : Facades/Massing for pacemaker utilities/living spaces

Material as drawing, drawing as construction, architectural models constructed into the assemblage of the making drawing.

Painted Clay Constructions : Gesso, Cyanotype, Cotton, Wire, Glass.

Process-Relational Philosophy : Alfred North Whitehead

Vibrant Matter : Jane Bennett

Blackness is a property, not a quality, that is to say, something fundamental, not an incidental embellishment.

About Drawing, Richard Serra.

Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Other Architecture

Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION

Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION

Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."

Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Russell Moreton Drawings : Speculative Constructions in Photography

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/