Stuart Arends

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Moonlight on the River, a solo exhibition of new work on paper by Stuart Arends. An opening reception for the artist will be held Saturday, January 5, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, March 16, 2019...

Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar” as Christian Mayeur, the founder of Mayeur Projects, wrote in Arends’s catalogue for the exhibition Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House. It’s as if Arends, in his choice of a site for living and working, deliberately wished to evoke the idea of stepping into a void in order to make the work—but a void that is in actuality a transactional space where objects take on subtleties of meaning, even if meaning is bracketed only by the specificity of materials…

Why would a contemporary artist with an international career live in the middle of nowhere, in Willard, New Mexico? The artist in question, Stuart Arends, as a joke, greets one of his visitors to Willard in Italian, saying that he hopes she will be entertained. Speaking Italian may seem odd in front of the Willard Cantina, but it’s not so strange when Arends is in Italy on one of his frequent trips there for an exhibition. Or perhaps the artist’s signature painted objects or his aluminum wedges are scheduled for a show in Germany or Switzerland. When he is back in the desert, though, Arends lives off the grid in a house he built. And there the artist is surrounded by the silence of his own 90 acres plus the thousands of others that don’t belong to him. That land comes with the aridity of a high and dry life with little rainfall and virtually no snowfall, and in the far distance are the Manzano Mountains off to the northwest with the occasional line of a freight train passing slowly on its way to or from West Texas; the train looks like a long, shiny snake moving slowly on the horizon…

Since 1980 Stuart Arends has been using a box as both a support and a surface. In 1985, he began working on a small cube that extended out from the wall. While he painted all six sides, the emphasis was on the three most visible. Initially, he worked on found wood, but subsequently he worked on sake boxes, whose sides were joined rather than nailed, and steel and aluminum boxes. Able to fit in the cupped palms of one’s hands, the boxes literally and visually stick out; they are at once elegant and awkward, which their scale makes all the more apparent because they do not cover the wall (think Donald Judd) but cling to it, inviting close scrutiny...

Minimalist artists explore the forefront of the art field by excluding the illusionistic, representational references found in traditional painting; Stuart Arends is no exception. He scrupulously avoids links to landscape, still life, portraiture or any definable, recognizable subject matter. He intends his relief paintings to be regarded as objects, reduced to a few geometric shapes and surface marks, devoid of any content. This artist constructs works that speak strictly to optical, perceptual issues...

Minimalism was so strenously and self-consciously iconoclastic, with its prim reductions, its insistently banal primary structures, and its chromophobia, that there is an almost equally iconoclastic pleasure to be had in work that takes up some aspect of this movement but recklessly adds whimsy or gaiety…