Solid Green
Sam Martineau and Wallace Whitney
June 17 to July 31, 2005
Solid Green is a two-person painting show by Wallace Whitney and Sam Martineau. Both are artists committed to painterly abstraction. This exhibition examines the impulse to paint from two distinct standpoints.
Martineau’s intimate paintings spring from abstraction and observation with diverse counterpoints occurring within each frame. Each of Martineau’s pictures is quite different from the next, with its own distinct character and individually structured premise. The pleasure of viewing these pictures is to participate in Martineau’s subtle color decisions and characteristic draughtsmanship, a hybrid blend of advertising, collage and automatic writing.
Wallace Whitney’s paintings are muscular, painted with the body, alternating from quick shifts of push/pull, to slow readings of deep space…following paint which is dragged or dribbled into and on the skins of surfaces. A felt expressionism inhabits these paintings: marks and flows accruing into a record of change and weather, a collection of moments. Whitney’s colors are deep and tonal, corresponding to nature, but more directly to emotional states of mind.
Together these two artists measure their own form of calculation and freedom through painting. Out on limbs, into Solid Green.