That Being Said
Alain Biltereyst
Robert Otto Epstein
Lukas Geronimas
Elizabeth Jaeger
July 18 - August 18, 2013
Robert Otto Epstein is interested in what he likes to call ‘chemical aesthetics’, the painterly process of reducing a thing into self-sufficient and repeatable units. Starting with a hand-drawn grid, he follows a chosen pattern and moves from bottom to top and right to left. His current work consists of paintings and drawings on paper based on turn of the century French and German filet lace patterns, design-based imagery imbedded in instructional diagrams, and harkens back to the computerized digitization of 1980s era 8-bit schemata. Alain Biltereyst’s plywood painting series touch on various abstract geometric styles, from Mondrian and Malevich to Oiticica or Frank Stella and Josef Albers. If these artists were about reduction of form and pure painting, Biltereyst’s abstractions employ references to contemporary everyday life and evoke familiar shapes: logos on currency, advertising on the sides of trucks, or fences on a country road.
Lukas Geronimas’s practice merges artwork and display, purposefully tipping toward the purely decorative or, conversely, purely functional. Although concerned with precision in craft, Geronimas often includes incidental surface details such as bits of tape or paint along the edges of a work. Discomfiting and tongue-in-cheek, Jaeger’s life-size plaster and ceramic sculptures of mostly women have a refreshing sense of humor and candor around the female identity. Never neglecting the fine details, her figures sport silky hair, appliquéd eyeballs and eyelashes, and hand-painted finger and toe nails. The uncanny comes from within, and the subliminal from without, but the two share the same area in the back of the mind. Within that space, various shapes, smells and textures run together.