Icebergs
March 24 - April 21, 2012
Galerie Trois Points is showing the second solo exhibition of artist David Gillanders. The mysterious and seductive Icebergs includes recent paintings of cosmic landscapes, as an exploration of scale and enigma.
A few years ago in a small Parisian gallery of old prints and documents, David Gillanders found a celestial map by the English astronomer John Flamsteed. Dated from the 17th century, the etching documented the positions of the stars visible in the northern hemisphere, with the Milky Way cutting a blue swath through the otherwise mathematical image. The artist discovered its title on the back, written in pencil: Little Map of the Sky. It seemed to him a beautiful and audacious thing to attempt, to condense the endless night sky to a few marks on an eight by ten-inch piece of paper.
Fascinated by maps, globes, calendars, language, mathematical notation, David Gillanders is interested in all the ways we have found to codify, clarify, and communicate our experiences of space, time, and ideas. His art practice, however, has always focused its attention on ambiguity and perception. No matter how precise our senses, or our codes and symbols, it seems to the artist there is always a gap between the world around us and the idea we make of it. This gap has been the starting point for his work.
The paintings in this exhibition find their origins in that Parisian gallery and in the Badlands of South Dakota. They offer by turns small, careful arrangements and large, complex patterns of dots, lines, and organic shapes on folds, waves, and fields of color. Even the more abstract among them invite flashes of recognition. But, true to the gap between our perceptions and the world around us, these paintings, like icebergs, suggest more than they show. Inspired by Flamsteed and the Great Plains, these paintings are maps of a different kind. They are maps without legends.