This body of work is titled Passage. The title refers to Jacques Lacan’s concept of the passage a l’acte, as interpreted by Slavoj Zizek, as “an impulsive moment into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration.”
This series of paintings sets forth the notion of painting as a system of communication, albeit a flawed one of layered codes that compete among each other in the picture plane. They invite the question, “Is a painting a solitary entity or does it now act as a screen – a medium that is part of a larger network of signifiers?”
The paintings in Passage begin with text and gestures that are collected from conversations, notes, choreography and subconscious physical movement such as tapping, shaking, flicking and are drawn with tape into the substrate of the painting. Then, images taken from random photographic sources are painted over the layer. The tape is removed and the images are “interrupted” or “cancelled” by text and gestures, building competing systems of signs that render different interpretations of the painting.
Documenting the process of making modes of representation and abstraction visible to the eye, and referring to the dictionary definition of the word, Passage is a passing of time, an opening through a space, a notation of a text, or in the Cubist sense, a technique to break up spatial relationships in painting.
Andrew Prayzner is a visual artist, educator, and a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn. He has twice been a resident at Yaddo and holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BFA from the University of Hartford. He has participated in numerous national and international group exhibitions including the Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Housatonic Museum of Art (Bridgeport, CT), The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Scotty Projects (Berlin, Germany) and SFA Projects (New York, NY). In the summer of 2015, Andrew was a resident at Studio Kura in Fukuoka, Japan. He concluded the residency with a solo exhibition of nocturnal drawings titled One Hundred Views of Nothing. In 2016, a solo exhibition titled Horizontals was presented in the project space at Morgan Lehman (New York, NY). In January 2019, Andrew exhibited twelve new paintings at the Hearst Corporation’s midtown gallery for an exhibition titled Art Now 2019: Metamorphosis, Changing Climate. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
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