SANTA MONICA, CA.- Minnesota-born artist Doug Argue’s New Paintings further explore themes of science, mathematics, and language. From a distance, his work suggests color field painting or abstract expressionism. A closer look reveals the paintings are comprised of letters of the alphabet—flowing, frenetic, or ethereal.

Argue covers the surfaces of his canvas with texts appropriated from a variety of literary sources. Page Turner’s letters are taken from Moby Dick, Swan in Love from Swann’s Way, Little Lamb and Tiger Tiger from William Blake’s poetry, although, the texts are no longer legible. Argue stretches, explodes, and atomizes the letters found on his canvases. Each of the thousands of letters are painted one at a time in prismatic colors and tones. He visualizes the mutability of language as vertical torrents, tumultuous currents, or meandering streams, which embody the flux of language itself —changing constantly in meaning, sound and grammar.

His work is both a dialogue with structural and post-structural linguistics, as much as it is with particle physics, astronomy and the natural world. The painted letters function as metaphors for the particulate nature of the universe—molecules, atoms, and chromosomes, which combine and recombine to form the evolution of the universe, life, and language.

Doug Argue (b. 1962) has exhibited at some of the foremost institutions and his works are included in numerous public collections including the Walker Art Center; the Minnesota Museum of American Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and the Frederic R. Weisman Foundation. In 2009 he was awarded with the Artist of the Year by the London International Creative Competition and in 1997 he was awarded the Rome Prize. His most recent achievement is a collateral exhibition in Venice to run during the 2015 Venice Biennale.

The exhibition is on view at Richard Heller Gallery from September 6 through October 11, 2014.