Niccola DeVereaux

Monday, November 16, 2015

SERIES_15

Niccola Devereaux & Ruben Vincent

Fiercely independent sensibilities communicated in different languages, together. Distinctive and discrete when placed next to each other, if compatible in their stark and subtle use of abstraction…Indeed, Series 15 featuring the work of Ruben Vincent and Niccola Devereaux initially deceives in its simplicity by seeming to be a dialogue between minimalists sending picto-haiku communiqués from opposite sides of a lunar observation deck. One work accounts for concrete bright shapes beginning to wear and fray, the other conjures intimations of formal cohesion from what could otherwise be calligraphic blots of an almost Rorschachian cast. The resulting dialectic becomes less about arriving at points of collaborative assimilation, than a back and forth in which the two artists inhabit moments of exchange through inversion as part of a larger project to reflect on difference. In step with this approach, apparent contrasts between the works often reveal surprising, if latent similarities in gesture and arrangement. And, though the tone of the artists’ pieces appear at first to achieve a safe dissonance to preserve their respective aesthetics, one progressively performs as the imperfect negative of the other. At one point, when Devereaux produces what could be seen as the shock neon yellow prow of an iceberg emerging from the right side of a stone gray background, Vincent responds by offering a wooly black pool squelching in from the left of the canvas with charred firs spiking out along the edges. Likely animated by different intentions, the two forces nevertheless arrive just near a point of convergence to productively tempt, but ultimately resist the pull toward symmetry and mimesis. Exposing relation through contrast, Series 15 resonates by moving past mere correspondence and translation into the provoked potentiality found in something akin to productive transmutation.

http://niccoladevereaux.com/

http://www.pairshaped.org/