Theresa Daddezio "Carbonara Sunrise"

It’s tempting to draw a less-than-obvious kinship between Daddezio and another artist who set out to subvert the modernist stripe: Daniel Buren’s banding is insistent, suggests the photomechanical in its obsessive repetition, and is only nominally aesthetic. But that comparison breaks down sharply and obviously in two aspects: in Daddezio’s paintings, the mechanistic reading, while clearly present, is immediately undermined by the evidence of the artist’s touch – the long lines are rendered by hand, and there is an obvious enthusiasm for the tactility and materiality that is the special jurisdiction of oil paint. And the more significant divergence from Buren (and Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis) is the methodology with which Daddezio uses the bands to articulate her signature tube forms. At the apex of the depicted volumes, alternating bands of contrasting high key colors hum and buzz in opposition to one another, setting those areas into vibrating motion and creating the illusion that her tubes are lit from inside. As they move away from the center, color contrast gradually decreases. This shift from saturated dissonance to low contrast consonance presents a novel take on the time-honored practice of modeling in painting.

Words and images via Transmitter Gallery NYC