Geoff McFetridge
Floating
November 9, 2012 - December 8, 2012

Opening reception Friday November 9, 2012 / 6 - 10pm

For press and sales information please inquire with the gallery.

COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo exhibition from Geoff McFetridge.

Geoff McFetridge was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1971. He attended the Alberta College of Art and Design, as well as the Graduate Design Program at the California Institute of the Arts. McFetridge is widely known for his reductive graphic style. He began to show his work in galleries in 1998, with his first exhibition at George's Gallery in Los Angeles, California. His first large-scale show was in Japan at Parco Gallery, Tokyo. McFetridge was part of the infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition which toured the world, and he has since had solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Seattle, Milan, and the Netherlands.

McFetridge creates his work with qualities that invite participation and connectivity with the viewer. His personal and commercial art projects use simple shapes to create universally recognized public signage, corporate logos and contemporary iconography. He evokes an interesting play between two and three dimensional space with simple yet intriguing lines fitting into his simplistic and playful style.

This will mark McFetridge's first solo exhibition in his native Canada. There will also be a limited edition silk screen released in conjunction with the show.

For press and sales information please inquire with the gallery.

3X3(Dealing With Abstraction) / Acrylic on canvas / 28" x 28" / 2012

Passing / Acrylic on canvas / 60" x 48" / 2012

About To Snap / Acrylic on canvas / 50" x 40" / 2012

Bathers (At Noon) / Acrylic on canvas / 44" x 38" / 2012

Graphics solve abstraction like a problem
Graphics are an intermediate step between an image and the abstract
Graphics are a mediator between things and abstraction
Graphics are a delivery system for the abstract
Graphics disguise abstraction as image
Graphics organize abstraction (see above)
Graphics make puzzles out of solutions
Graphics monetize the abstract
Graphics is abstraction done at a desk
Graphics pull the world apart. Abstraction tears it up.
Graphics are how we agree to see. Abstraction is an argument.
Graphics are the memories we have of things. Abstraction is what things we do not remember look like.

I went to school and studied "Commercial Art". I remember one lesson distinctly. The instructor told us to avoid "coincidence". This is where two forms unintentionally coincide. Like a tabletop lining up with a horizon line.

Of course, in the real world, tabletops line up with horizons all day. When I see coincidence I feel like it is a moment when the world around us revealing that it is visual, there is no emotion, there is no meaning, and yet it is not chaos, it is an well orchestrated concoction of shape, color and light.

When a tabletop lines up with a horizon, or when a head seen from a specific angle becomes a perfect circle, this is the unknown talking back to us in our language, the cosmos mimicking the simplicity of the man made. The terrestrial triviality of right angles, shapes and symmetry appearing to us like god tapping us on the shoulder.

I spend a lot of my time thinking with form. Form is the center of my world, so when things like that happen they are my miracles. Everyday things becoming transcendent. I paint the mundane, but the images are meant to imply magic.

Images are central to my painting. The images are varied, while my treatment of them is very consistent. The imagery is refined to a point of anonymous functionality. The paintings are meant to feel as if they were pulled directly from the lexicon.

In some ways I consider the images in these paintings to be found. This is not to say that I observed all (or any) of these things happening (although many of them did happen) If I did I ever observe a group of boys holding a girl above them, is it any different than how someone else would imagine a group of boys holding a girl above them? Did I observe people standing thigh deep in a lake, shadows cast over their faces like veils, did you?

To take it even further. If I did observe any of these things, were these things happening because the people involved were unconsciously acting out something iconic, replacing a mental image with a real experience? When you walk with your fingers, do they walk like Saul Bass had them walk in the Yellow Pages Logo?

I paint some things because they are things that I have seen, but more importantly, I believe they are things that the viewer has seen. I am painting from life, but not life purely found in the landscape, but the also psychological, mediated, and transcendental world that infects our consciousness.

I have always used drawing as the foundation of my process, a process that is very narrow and structured. I have found that the practice of refining form is mantra-like. The narrowing of thoughts and form is a business like version of meditation. These paintings are the product of that process. In these paintings I attempt to pry apart the the conscious and the unconscious, the world as it is and the familiar. The work attempts to separate floating from what floating looks like… in an image...

- Geoff McFetridge

Sports / Acrylic on canvas / 48" x 72" / 2012

Geoff McFetridge
Floating
November 9, 2012 - December 8, 2012

Opening reception Friday November 9, 2012 / 6 - 10pm

For press and sales information please inquire with the gallery.

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