TEXT BY MICHAELA MULLIN | VIEW IMAGES
Skylights, Landfall, Sundown, and Echoes—these are not just titles for Derrick Breidenthal’s new work; these are oil paintings that make mood, provoke contemplation, and pause us briefly, in a world gone fast and furious. Atmosphere is Breidenthal’s forte, and he is conscious of both nature and man’s mechanical place within it. This coexistence, sometimes, is not so peaceful.
Breidenthal’s statement takes us into a fuller sensory understanding of his influences and process: I notice the smell of cut pasture and the drift of color in the sky. The rhythm of nature and the vibration of machine. Dust that covers the horizon like fog. I keep painting. Knowing but not knowing. I keep painting. Probing and pressing for the pulse, until I find something that wants to be saved.
This exhibit, Pulse, is a show of large-scale horizon and sky paintings. Imagine putting your head back, or lying on the ground, and witnessing the day and night sky through an aperture. These are luscious swirls of color and milky, smoky, brushstrokes. Cloud cover lets whatever sunlight spread, to focus the viewer’s eye on the edges and the halation which hover around, above, and beyond us, always.
“Skylight 1-7” offer the viewer a light(ed) view of the sky, as well as suggesting a pane and frame that would make such a thing as a skylight. Magenta and bright blood red, alongside a seeping, trailing deep blue through lagoon-blue sky—these detail a few of the series.
But the first and last, #1 and #7, give us the perfect peach gradients, cotton, set, and cotton pulled and stretched to the edges of a sunset-lit sky of darker blues. While #2, #3, and #4 disrupt our illusioned focus to make all color fog-like, as if the air itself is infused with pigment, and particles of water are just waiting to release themselves upon us. Blue to red to a mixing of these for deep pinks; we are watching the change—it is right before our eyes.
And finally, #5 and #6, the works of the starkest contrast, are almost vein-like, blood or blue-shot compositions. A portion of the eye. Or the eye of a storm. The sinewy lines that bleed and expand, become diluted in the wet sky and dispersed by the diffuse light. The color spreads, being taken in by the lighter paint, as diffusion would occur in water.
“Landfall” and “Echoes” take a different approach to making line and emotion. In single color Richter-esque horizontal streaks, which span a large portion of the canvas, Breidenthal leaves the lower foreground for more solid abstract structure. And if you look closely enough, there are earthly things occurring in these, as well. The ground holds soil and pavement and light and water, as if infrared glasses have suddenly given us only one or so colors of the light spectrum.
“Levee Road” and “Sundown” are skyscapes which follow the horizon line. This elongates for a more panoramic lens. And in the small land strips there are also things happening on the ground—yellowed lights are small points but feel high-beamed. Roads are visible for small sections of the compositions, and then you may hit a grove of silhouetted trees. These intense works are about visibility, and as we know by now, visibility is a two-way (with crossroads) street.
Though some paintings in Pulse may be and feel darker—seemingly without figures—what could invoke post-apocalyptic depictions are diametrically opposite to this scenario: they are meditative, and with this, one can find self, and other, and calm (peace?). Breidenthal says he paints and probes for a pulse, waiting to find “something that wants to be saved.” Viewing these works can quiet us, so that we, too, may be hopeful in our quest for elements of our world that want continuation.
Exhibit Images
