JAMES WARREN: Viewing Devices

Marvin Gardens is pleased to present VIEWING DEVICES, James Warren’s debut solo
exhibition in New York. This succinct group of six oil paintings takes us on a journey through semi-impressionistic landscapes by way of dialectical signs, as the title hints. Warren impresses with measured detail in both technique and depiction, rendering digital glitches as well as digital image-making processes, denoted by painting the dragged circle of a clone-stamp tool. The build-up of thin and concise paint-layers allows a generous amount of light to come through from the ground, perhaps signaling these paintings’ awareness of being made in a post-screen environment. Yet the overall palette being warm seems to take back a bit of that screen-light and return it to the “natural” world as depicted. By layering opposing pictorial devices such as landscape and interior spaces that merge, and by painting pictures within pictures, the artist seems to be stepping back with each rhetorical nod in order to allow the work to step further into an unseen algorithm of complicity. That which most of us have become a part of day by day, and some hour by hour, whereby the viewers and the makers of images step ever closer toward each other in time and presence, now that physical geography is no longer the main arena, and network-geography has seemingly gained dominance. However, these works never leave painting’s resolve. Every blade of grass is rendered by a paint mixture’s carefully planned viscosity and measured transparency. It is carefully dialed “just-so,” slightly more on the side of
being a brush stroke than a blade of grass. And so these images’ quiet insistence takes place in their physical location, wherever they may travel.