by Ellen Crumb
Arron Sturgeon’s latest exhibition at Artifact Projects offers a truly unique and immersive experience that blurs the boundaries between visual and auditory art forms. The innovative use of QR codes, each linked to a musical score corresponding to the exhibited painting, transforms the gallery into a space where the senses harmoniously converge. Sturgeon’s paintings, characterized by a delicate dance between the analytical and the sensual, beckon viewers into a realm on the brink of deconstruction. The artist masterfully employs the grid as an understructure, delineating passageways and container edges within his pictorial spaces.
These platonic structures serve as a canvas for Sturgeon’s baroque elasticity, where coloristic skeins evoke sensations of stretched putty or skin. The paintings reside in a liminal state, poised between meltdown and metamorphosis, resisting easy categorization. Upon closer inspection, ambiguity reigns, challenging the observer’s perception over time. Transparency, fluidity, permeability, and structured etherealization become the defining features of these works, embodying Nietzsche’s concept of the “lightness” of things.
Sturgeon’s play with oppositions is palpable. Lightness, associated with transparency and immateriality, coexists with the grounded materiality of the artist’s paint handling. The systematic matrix of verticals and horizontals, juxtaposed with the scattered distribution of light and paint, creates a sense of plenitude within the enigmatic voids of each piece. The artist’s intent to transcend aesthetic and intellectual boundaries is evident. Sturgeon navigates the delicate balance between geometric abstraction and gestural expressionism, weaving a remarkable integrative ideal.
The paintings not only visually insinuate an incipient expansion principle within pictorial space but also celebrate the physicality of the artist’s labor, grounding the ideal into the earth through energetic paint handling. The marriage of visual and auditory elements, the dance between oppositions, and the liminal state of his paintings create an intense and thought-provoking experience. Sturgeon invites viewers to explore the infinite possibilities within his canvases, where the imagination takes flight, and the lightness of things finds resonance.