[cont’d…] New Tenets in Geometric Abstraction explores the phenomenon of physical optics in the painted surface as well as the three-dimensional painting as object. Visual effects achieved through the inherent physical properties of the chosen medium and new techniques of paint application combine in the art of Samantha Bittman, Peter Demos and Russell Tyler. Each artist employs a unique exploration of material, color, composition, rhythm, proportion and form to culminate in new, non-objective image making. In addition to formal art historical parallels one can make, each of these artists a truly new painting that finds influence outside the canon of art and more from the broad world of design. Russell Tyler borrows color and form from outmoded perceptions of the future as seen in vintage science fiction movie sets whereas Samantha Bittman references indigenous textiles whose function supersedes its design; Peter Demos conceives his work as modular units that exist and respond to the architectural space they occupy.

Samantha Bittman creates woven textiles which become an unconventional ground for paintings when stretched. The textile’s warp and weft is a binary code and the subsequent painted composition is influenced by a base set of rules inherent in the woven pattern. The painting often conceals much of the textile but in the end, the textile and the painting rely on each other and one could not exist without the other. The unstretched textile without paint would only be a piece of cloth and the paintings without their woven code would have no DNA to begin life.

Samantha Bittman received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, 2004, and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute, 2004.  She has had recent exhibitions at the Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Between A Place and Candy: Pattern, Repetition, and Motif, Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY, and Azettagh, OUTLET, Brooklyn, NY.  She currently lives and works in Chicago.

Peter Demos makes paintings which stem from late minimalism and the works explore the subtlety of light and form. Conscious of the history of painting but free of dogma, Demos paintings are often reduced the solitary color black. Form within the composition is registered in the eye through rectangular elements painted in contrasting matte or gloss paint. These elements are held in constant tension as the forms do not neatly adhere to a grid, but rather approach or repel each other slightly askew. It is the visual equivalent to holding two magnets with the polarity aligned.

Peter Demos born in Wheat Ridge Colorado and received his B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, 2004, and M.F.A. from The City University of New York, Hunter College, 2008.  Most recent solo exhibitions include Carbon Copy, The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, New York and 10 Paintings, David Richard Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.

Russell Tyler applies richly textured and fully chromatic strokes of paint to canvas which are confined to their compositional elements by precise edges. The paintings allow for dual perceptions: first, a physically present painted object with a surface texture so thickly applied it casts shadows on itself and second, a purely visual picture with nuanced properties of color and composition. The resulting effect is one of simultaneous familiarity and novelty.