Derrick Buisch | wisconsinacademy.org
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Derrick Buisch

  • Gallery

I focus on abstract painting informed by ordinary, everyday visual information. Twelve years of painting abstractly provides me with a fertile working territory. The major concentration in this body of work is the development of an idiosyncratic, abstract visual language. My original fascination in ideograms transitioned into a more automatic, abstract painting vocabulary. These paintings involve the investigation of three specific properties: drawing, structure, and color. Inspirations for these works come from a variety of pedestrian sources such as: roadside signs, strip malls, graffiti, tattoos, and product symbol design.

Drawing is explored as both a signifying system and an automatic gesture. The drawings transcribed in these paintings are circuitous. Through the repetition, reconfiguration, and recycling of marks a loop is created, a dense weave of insular information. Scraps of paper, receipts, and old envelopes from discarded mail all serve as supports for random scribbles. Sketchbooks and smaller drawings serve as a source from which the paintings quote. The marks are simultaneously lyrical and clumsy. This research calibrates the tension between the personal gesture (scribble) and the public mark (signage).

Multiple visual structures are employed to compose a range of various atmospheres. The structure in the compositions is intended to be unsettling. Due to dramatic cropping and an ambiguous center of balance the paintings give the sensation of falling or slipping. This response of vertigo infects the initial act of looking at the work. A visual pressure is provoked through the structure. The paintings meant to be first visually engaging, and then unnerving.

The color represents a range of materials from the synthetic (plastic, bubblegum, crayons) to the natural (old walls, shallow pools of water, flesh), as well as having a physical presence, one that is both mouth watering and sensuous. The surfaces vary in types of paint application employed, revealing the element of time involved in making the painting. These paintings are developed at different rates, incorporating varying degrees of pigment and oil. Subtle changes in color and surface tone evoke compressed shifts in the visual space. The differences in paint viscosity are subtle and precise and extremely important in differentiating each painting. Ultimately the surfaces of these paintings are luscious and mysterious.

I believe in the importance of the reflective space provided by painting. I relish the slow time in both the making and the reading of the work. These paintings are a distilled chaos riddled with small incidences of uneasy hilarity, which creates a rigorous abstraction that is simultaneously evocative and elusive.

My work is inspired by the poetic potential of a new vocabulary of abstraction. The varied meanings and the material possibilities of pigment are fully explored. Future research will result with abstract paintings that will be resonant and unnerving.

More of my work can be found on my website 202c.com.
 

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Madison, Wisconsin 53726
Phone: 608.733.6633

 

James Watrous Gallery 
3rd Floor, Overture Center for the Arts
201 State Street
Madison, WI 53703
Phone: 608.733.6633 x25