Maps are of interest to me for two reasons:
1. They are a representation of reality, and we take for granted that they are an accurate representation. We faithfully assume, for the most part, what we are looking at is accurate. Can we be sure of this?
2. Maps are an abstraction, reducing the world to lines and shapes and using a range of formal means to do so: line, color, scale, shape, size, etc… What fascinates me, specifically as a painter, is how the symbolic arrangement of these formal elements as a map translate to an abstract painting.
Written by Ed Charbonneau, November, 2007:
Hello friends,
Erica and I we're in Chicago this past weekend for the opening of Mike
Slagle's exhibition of new paintings. I was so impressed with Mike's
work that I thought I'd write to pass along information about viewing
his work on-line and perhaps persuade people to make the trip to
Chicago to see the show in person.
Some of you may know Mike from his days at the College of Visual Arts,
and others through Mike being one of my studio mates in Minneapolis
before he left for graduate school at Rutger's in 2002. Mike has been
a close for friend for several years now, and I've always thought
highly of his work. However, this exhibition of his paintings exceeded
my expectation in many ways.
In the spring of 2006, I was in New York and saw several of Mike's
paintings. These now mark the beginning of the series he now has up in
Chicago. In these early paintings, Mike kept the images and forms on
the canvas flat and graphic - like the maps he used as reference. In
this way, they struck me as still-life paintings of confounded maps.
However, this past winter, Mike began to infuse a sense of linear
perspective into his compositions. For me, this move signified a shift
from still-life to landscape. It is here where the body of work as a
whole becomes particularly fascinating for me to consider: I believe
that Mike has created paintings that strive toward a mono-semiotic
concept. They no longer refer merely to the maps that inspired the
work, but rather, they are landscapes of a concept that began and
evolved through the early work. It is as if the work acknowledges how
the concept of representation has been altered by the way technology
carries and structures information. In this way, Mike's paintings
remind me of how I feel when looking at Julie Mehretu or Sarah Sze's
work. There is an underlying force that has structure and form which
is increasingly affected by the din of technology in these artists'
work. They seem to be conscious of how technology is challenging the
very notion of what can be considered intuitive to the representation
of information. For me, their work becomes a conflation of its
subject and concept and proceeds to refer endlessly back to itself
rather than to secondary subjects. Since viewing Mike's work on
Saturday, I've been contemplating his move to place the structuring
technology of linear perspective into representations of information
and what implications that may have for organizing his future work.
Furthermore, Mike's aesthetic choices captivated me in many ways. He
uses color combinations that are very unusual and striking. Near-value
colors scintillate across some of the work, while stark chroma and
value contrasts hold other paintings intact. The linear qualities of
the work range from frantic to serene as the lines enforce depth or
flatness from work to work.
Finally, Mike's paintings have a physicality that the web photographs
do not describe. He wraps his canvas around extra-thick stretcher
bars. The bold shapes and colors operate on a human scale and the
richness of the gallery lighting made the paint glow. Also, in many
cases, brush-strokes of thinly layered paint can be seen in the
paintings at close inspection. At first, these brush marks bothered
me. My preconceived ideas about the work was that it would be clean
and minimally executed. But after considering these marks I began to
build an appreciation for them. As I thought about them on the drive
home yesterday, I found myself connecting the marks of Mike's
paintings to this huge titanium cloud that Inigo Manglano-Ovalle had
at the Rochester Art Center. In this piece, the cloud form was
presented as a gigantic, gleaming, metal sculpture hanging just off
the floor. Upon approach, the form seemed likely to have been
fabricated by a machine. However, its surface was clad in small
squares of foil that did not perfectly match one another. In this way,
the imperfections of the surface stole the work away from the machine
and made it more human, much in the same way that I read the paint on
Mike's canvases.
Those are a few thoughts I've had relating to the exhibition.
Congratulations to Mike for his accomplishment.
Best,
Ed