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Chandra Cerrito Contemporary

February 4 - March 20, 2011

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480 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612
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Flux + Linearis Sabine Reckewell, Installation with Black String, 1980 / 2011, black string, nails, 8 x 8 x 4 feet
Chandra Cerrito Contemporary presents two solo shows Dianne Romaine: "Flux" and Sabine Reckewell: "Linearis "Flux" is an ongoing series of over one hundred acrylic paintings on canvas created since 2005 by the minimalist and process-driven artist Dianne Romaine. The pared down imagery and palette is that of dark brown dots surrounded by halo-like stains of pigment. Some compositions are heavily populated by dense clusters of smaller dots and are reminiscent of both microscopic biology and galactic occurrences. Others feature dots so close up that the edges are not in view, making them comparatively monumental. Romaine’s wet on wet application of paint on canvas to achieve a staining effect recalls the work of Color Field painters Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler and their “soak stain” technique using heavily diluted oil paint on raw canvas. Optical complexities, particularly in dense clusters of dots that seem to both recede deeply and flatten on the surface, recall Yayoi Kusama’s eye-bending patterns, though Romaine’s paintings maintain a more subdued, meditative tone. The Flux paintings, like some paintings by Ross Bleckner, hint at infinity--an endless vast space in which repeated objects float, swirl and pulse. Sabine Reckewell: "Linearis" It is well worth revisiting the string, ribbon, wire and tape installations created by Sabine Reckewell between 1979 and 1981. At the time, these “three-dimensional room-size drawings” represented a literal unraveling of the artist’s textile-based training as she responded to recently emerging Conceptualism and Minimalism. Like the works of Sol Lewitt, Reckewell’s installations are created within well-defined parameters, which dictate their eventual forms. Some installations utilize multiple strings of equal length stretched between adjacent walls at incrementally varying distances, creating a systematic change in the tension of each strand and resulting in a volumetric form. Current-day Bay Area artists like Jana Flynn and Brian Caraway are beginning to explore the use of string to create architectural and sculptural volumes. Perhaps the clarity of vision united with process, directness of means and simplicity of material is attractive to artists and viewers living in a hands-off, information-overload digital age. It is exciting to see that Reckewell has not only helped open this territory of fiber-based architectural scale installation, but that she is also beginning to revisit it herself. About the Artists Bay Area artist Dianne Romaine received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988. She was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2003-2007 and in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, di Rosa in Napa, the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, University of California, Santa Cruz, Works, San Jose, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM and Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, MA. Sabine Reckewell was born in Germany, where she was trained in industrial design at the Bauhaus-based Institution Academy of Fine Arts in Kassel from 1970-73. She moved to the United States to expand her textile design work into sculpture, installation and performance art at the University of California, Davis, where she received her Bachelor of Science in textile design, and at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Art in textile art. Reckewell recently returned to the Bay Area after living in New York City for twenty years. Her work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York, NY, Lyons Weir Gallery in Chicago, IL and at Claremont Graduate University Art Gallery and Pitzer College in Claremont, CA.
Flux + Linearis Dianne Romaine, Flux 102, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches