WESTON ART GALLERY



650 Walnut Street 
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

RICK MALLETTE
"Paintings and Wall Drawing"
December 18-February 28, 2010





ARTIST STATEMENT
Drawing is easy for me; painting is hard. I seek an immediacy in the paintings that I find comes naturally in drawing. Therefore, I paint quickly with brushes and putty knives. The image can change dramatically many times over and a whole painting can be lost in minutes. What you see in this show is a collection of stopping points, when all the elements solidify but hold an active tension. This tension is elusive, subject to my personal taste and generally resides at that interface between opposites such as abstract/realistic, flatness/depth, complexity/simplicity, comic/tragic, male/female, etc.

The content originated several years ago in an attempt to develop an emotional caricature to visualize the dynamics of human relationships. The work then moved from multiple characters to individual portraits. Once approached more rationally and systematically, with specific emotions in mind, this recent work is arrived at intuitively—pulling from a personal vocabulary in search of new context and new meaning.

The wall drawings started in 1994 during my final days of grad school. Keenly aware of my education’s debt and seeking a cheaper approach to art making, I needed something that didn’t require a studio and was possible with minimal supplies. Nearly all of my shows since then have included a site-specific, temporary wall drawing. The commission for the Weston is my twentieth.

The first wall drawing was made with India ink on white walls. Subsequent drawings have been created with pencil, marker, invisible ink, gouache, latex, and charcoal on white, pink, yellow and gray walls. They are always improvised without use of preliminary sketches—having no particular starting point—and jump around until I find a rhythm in the scale and spacing of the forms. In this exhibition, Gray Wall Drawing took about fifty hours to complete and will be painted over at the exhibition’s close.

The most obvious and recurring theme in the wall drawings is the search for connection and purpose. The forms can be thought of as incomplete organs seeking function by hooking up with other incomplete organs seeking the same.
LINK: Weston Art Gallery

PRESS: "Points of Departure" by Matt Morris for CityBeat (Jan.6, 2010)



VIDEO: WALK THROUGH SHOW



INVENTORY
1. The Race (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
2. Hearing and Seeing at Night (2009) Oil on Wood. 36 x 36 inches
3. Orange Eyes with Pink Pattern (2009) Oil on Canvas. 24 x 24 inches
4. Round Nose, Orange Beard (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
5. Fire Hair with Purple Ear (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
6. GRAY WALL DRAWING (Dec.9-18, 2009) Marker & Acrylic on Wall. 10 x 37 feet
7. X’s for Eyes (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
8. Two Tongues (2009) Oil on Wood. 36 x 36 inches
9. Green Teeth, One Eye (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
10. Green-Pink Head (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
11. Curly Orange Hair (2009) Oil on Wood. 36 x 36 inches
12. Nine Racked Eyes (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
13. Coiled Tongue in a Blue Mouth (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
14. Green Goggles (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
15. Concerned Red (2009) Oil on Wood. 36 x 36 inches
16. Green Blobs on a Orange Face (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
17. Eye-Tongue (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
18. Blue Beard, Blue Brow (2009) Oil on Wood. 36 x 36 inches
19. Handshake Mouth (2009) Acrylic on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
20. Red Mask (2009) Oil on Wood. 17 x 17 inches
21. Big Yellow Nose (2009) Oil on Wood. 17 x 17 inches
22. Split (2009) Oil on Wood. 24 x 24 inches
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