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Moberg Gallery | Des Moines, IA
Friday, June 1, 2018
Exhibiting artists include: Justin Beller, Derrick Breidenthal, Tibi Chelcea, Frank Hansen, Thomas C. Jackson, Mary Jones, Larassa Kabel, Richard Kelley, Thérèse Murdza, Travis Rice, Scott Charles Ross, Conn Ryder, Rob Stephens, Senid Tabakovic, and Jay Vigon.
Justin Beller’s new paintings and sculptures are exquisite renderings of the picture plane, distinguished through line, space, flat application, but also the very real three-dimensionality of his human-height sculptural works. Standing before “Outside” and “Elevate,” one considers those very positions and placements, and where the homonymous relationship held by siting and sighting comes into sharp relief. These works are like steady grammar, delicately surrendered to the primacy of forms. Though certainly not decorative, these sculptures are reminiscent of Alexander Girard’s wooden dolls, with a more organic, rounded Memphis design influence. But Beller here is representing nothing so human or animalistic as the former; and yet isn’t patterning functional objects, as the latter. These standing works appear as soft disruptions into the natural interplay of human animals and functional objects.
“Voyage,” “Us,” and especially “Side by Side,” (all Acrylic and UV clear on oak panel), catapult us into the imaginary—where shape makes familiar—it is what one can and does imagine with a corollary or referent in the world. But even in the former two—where the figurative is less of a guide—the sections and directions Beller takes to break up color, contrasting blues and browns with a mustard patch that touches deep purple, make an overlap of shapes that conceives of a grid disappeared. Its gridded element is swallowed in favor of abstract storytelling, stripes and dots emerging as a new type of order.