NEW YORK, NY.- For D. Wigmore Fine Art’s first solo exhibition for Francis Celentano, the gallery has selected two bodies of work, the Alpha series (1968-1971) and the Electra series (1990-1992), to demonstrate the artist’s use of color and structure, often through patterning, to create a distinct visual experience. The selected paintings show Celentano’s methodical development for each series, his embrace of technology, and his ceaseless exploration of color’s possibilities.

Francis Celentano came to national attention with his painting Lavender Creed (1964) in MoMA’s 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye, which announced the new international style Op Art. Celentano used studies to establish a technical approach for each series he did. Screen printing, stencils, and an airbrush were key to his 1960s compositions as computer programs would be in the 1990s. His New York dealer in the 1960s was the Howard Wise Gallery, known for its focus on art and technology. His paintings were, in fact, support for the first computer-generated art exhibition, organized by the Howard Wise Gallery in 1965.

An important step in Francis Celentano’s development was his participation in the International Artists’ Seminar in 1965, where he met Polish artist Wojciech Fangor (1922-2015). The program, held at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, brought international and American artists together in a residential program for the exchange of ideas on new artistic practices. The focus of the 1965 seminar was Op art and half of the ten artists selected were included in MoMA’s The Responsive Eye earlier that year. Fangor’s work had the greatest impact on Celentano as the Polish artist’s sprayed colors provided an alternative to the high contrast black and white preferred by most Op artists.

Francis Celentano moved to Seattle in 1966 to join the faculty of the University of Washington’s School of Art. There he researched color theory and explored methods of spraying to formulate his own strategy for color.

For Francis Celentano’s first series in color, the Alpha paintings (1968-1971), the artist used an airbrush to soften transitions of high-keyed colors within a single stripe. The gradient stripes alternate with solid colored stripes to provide structure. The contrast of the two creates dramatic tension and with continued looking, the stripes disappear and waves of color ebb and flow in the viewer’s space. Celentano’s choice of airbrush with its fine particles of pure color adds to the sense of the painting being an atmosphere rather than an object.

The 1990s brought the age of the pixel with the expansion of personal computers. For Celentano the particles of color in his Alpha paintings became pixels in his Electra series. He used an early version of Photoshop to generate colors within an array of squares on a solid ground. He selected two colors in the same tone as the background and two in sharp contrast, which he arranged into units of four squares. Those units were then flipped and mirrored to fill out the 45 x 60 inch composition. This act of manipulating a pattern recalls Celentano’s Op paintings. The computer was also used to determine the scale of the squares to the background color as Celentano was interested in how a viewer’s distance effects the reading of a painting.

Once Celentano settled on a color arrangement and scale, he applied the colors to paint on canvas, taping out a grid of ¼” squares. From across a room, the Electra painting look like a single field of color, difficult to hold down but overall the background dominates. Moving closer, varying lines of diagonals and zigzags flash across the painting, the result of the mirroring and reversing patterns. Up close, the viewer discovers the pixel-like squares. Each Electra painting gives the viewer the experience of an electric field of color with infinite movement.

Celentano’s work across six decades considered in an intellectual, structured approach the emotional effects of color, its sensuous qualities. By identifying patterns and economic ways to execute intricate paintings, Celentano continued to find new series to expand his understanding of color and its effect on all of us. Critic Suzi Gablik said of his paintings, “Color is an event, not a fact.” In both the Alpha and Electra series, Celentano makes this clear.

Francis Celentano’s 1968 kinetic painting Hexagonal Metamorphosis is currently on view in Action-Reaction, 100 Years of Kinetic Art, September 22, 2018 - January 20, 2019 at the Kunsthal Rotterdam. Celentano’s work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Francis Celentano: Color in Motion is on view Sept 13 – Nov 16, 2018 at D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., 152 W 57th Street, 3rd Floor, New York.