PARIS.- Perrotin Paris is presenting Chasing Rainbows, Josh Sperlings first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together a number of new works by the New York-based artist: compositesor shaped canvases and plywood panelsa series of monochrome canvas reliefs, and a large-scale installation.
Sperlings dynamic clusters of brightly colored forms blur the lines between painting and sculpture, image and object. Though each shaped canvas is distinct, it relies on other forms in the field for compositional coherence and energy. Often asymmetrical and happily off-kilter, a cluster is always satisfying in its surprising arrangement. In Poppycock (2017), three ovals compete for prominence in the center of the composition, shuffling and re-shuffling before settling into a makeshift pile. A maroon arch buttresses them, cradling them into stillness. These snaking formssquigglesappear throughout Sperlings work and act, alternately, as instigators and appeasers of movement: the maelstrom of forms that characterizes Sperlings work. To execute a single squiggle, sheets of plywood are laid on top of each other, resembling a topographical model, before they are covered in canvas and painted over in Sperlings signature palate of saturated, sometimes clashing colors. The ridges of the wooden armature, visible through the canvas, add sculptural contrast to Sperlings interest in flatnessof color, of form.
In Lovey Dovey (2017), a blue trident eclipses a pink orb. The overlap is rendered in a marbling of the two tones. So intense is the collision of shape and color, force against force, that the surface collapses and the colors co-mingle. Over this eclipse of forms, a single curve arches like an eyebrow in an expression of alarm, or like a crescent moon presiding over the collision and framing the event. Dots, one red and one white, act as a kind of punctuation. They are the only seemingly stable forms in an otherwise mercurial landscape of shape, color, and relation. Everything appears on the verge of balance, suspended precariously before it might tumble and fall into a new configuration. Motion seems imminent.
Sperlings range of influences is broad. Frank Stella and his shaped canvases are clear predecessors for the meticulously crafted supports over which Sperling stretches his canvases. In this, Sperling resembles another American abstractionist, Ellsworth Kelly, whose signature hard-edge shapes took near-sculptural form in his later work; no longer the subject, they became the object itself, dictating its edges and its projection into space. Sperling picks up where his precursors left off, combining the concerns of paintingcolor and compositionwith the spatial potential of sculpture. Whereas Kelly and Stellas forms are unwaveringly stark, Sperlings are sinuous and surprising.
The artist cites Googie signage, the exuberant graphic fad of the 50s Jetsons-y asterisks and boomerangsas an influence. Sperlings forms communicate a comparable uplift of feeling, both in color and in contour. Also in Sperlings aesthetic lineage is the short-lived Memphis furniture trend of the 80s. (Sperling was born in 84.) That movements postmodern all-things-go design philosophy disavowed good taste and touted improbable shapes and outrageous colors instead. Sperling is as steeped in design as he is in art history, and borrows from both. More canonical sources like Jean Arps kidney-shaped wall-reliefs, for instance, or the motion lines surrounding Keith Harings figures are also echoed in Sperlings vocabulary of forms. This diversity of associations is to Sperlings credit: his ability to marshal a great number of varied references deftly and seamlessly into a single work and a total oeuvre. He is capable of reverence without conceding originality or energy. The works in this exhibition are no exception, as they straddle painting and sculpture daringly, venturing from the wall and intruding into the space joyfully.