McKenzie Fine Art: Don Voisine 2023 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467

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	Don Voisine May 12 - June 25, 2023
	In Don Voisine’s taut and elegant paintings, simple geometries are set against light or dark grounds, flanked top and bottom by bands of contrasting color. In this latest body of work, diamond and lozenge shapes and cruciform arrangements predominate. Rather than working with forms gleaned from architecture or other references, most of the new work returns to standard geometric shapes. However, the move towards more purely abstract imagery has not precluded an exploration of architectonic and sculptural space in these new paintings. Additionally, Voisine has embraced more direct color choices, in both the geometries and in the accompanying bands. But, as always, the color mixes can be playful, as in the narrow silver and chartreuse bands of Quake, inspired by neighborhood graffiti. A hallmark of Voisine’s paintings is his use of contrasting matte and glossy sections and directional brushwork to crisply differentiate his geometries. Working in oil, and in some instances, oil and acrylic, his overlapping, adjacent, and nesting forms are markedly frontal in this new work, recalling emblems, badges, and heraldic shapes. They occupy a shallow space as they emphatically push forward towards the viewer. In some of the cruciform compositions, a contrasting square of transparent white or black floats like a veil over the dominant shape. In others, narrow bars defining the cruciform are slightly off kilter, rendered in a contrasting surface texture, as in Quake (the largest work in the show at 70 x 60 inches; the smallest works are 12 inches square). In Keel, the vertical element of the cruciform appears to carry over into the green color bands at top and bottom, creating a darker element in that area. Many of Voisine’s new paintings employ diamond and lozenge shapes, which the artist is revisiting after well over a decade. The recent exhibition at Denver’s Robischon Gallery of Voisine’s monumental series,The Clock (2009-21), consisting of twenty-four 11-3/4 inch square paintings of argyle-like patterns, inspired the artist to explore this compositional form in larger-scale paintings. The tension in these works derives from the emphatic frontality of the diamond shape which presents as both flat and as an orthographic projection. Don Voisine has been exhibiting his paintings nationally and internationally in gallery and museum shows for nearly fifty years. His paintings and works on paper are in the permanent collections of museums across the United States and in Germany. Voisine’s exhibitions have been reviewed extensively, in such publications as Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Art in America, Artcritical, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among many others. On May 6, 2023, Voisine was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters by The University of Maine, Fort Kent.