Bruno David presents "The Inner Chapters", an exhibition of paintings by Damon Freed. This is Freed’s eleventh solo exhibition at Bruno David Gallery.
Damon Freed statement on The Inner Chapters paintings: "In the west, we have a name for different stages of development in an artistic career. We refer to these stages as maturities. The Inner Chapters, or, the black paintings, was my third major maturity as an artist and most significant. Work on this series began in the early summer of 2004 and was summarized by the end of 2008 into a series of seven 6’ x 6’ paintings and one 21” x 21” painting. Many preparatory drawings were also made the previous summers. This series of black and grey paintings was created upon my returning home to Brooklyn after having visited Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art where I viewed The Stations of the Cross, a black and white series of large-scale paintings created by the Abstract Expressionist artist Barnett Newman between the years of 1958-66.
Having stood in the Newman room at the museum for at least an hour soaking in the intricacies of form and having visited Dia Beacon in upstate New York to see Agnes Martin’s paintings, I immediately knew what I was to do when I returned to New York. A shape and a semblance of process came to mind and once I made it back I started working immediately narrowing my focus over the course of three years ending with The Inner Chapters I – VIII.
During this time in New York, I not only saw an aesthetic way through Newman and Martin’s paintings, I was also reading their writings on art. I was involved with the literature of Taoism; the Tao Te Ching written by Lao Tzu, and with Chuang Tzu’s equally philosophical/religious writings. And I had just purchased at the museum the first-time published book of Mark Rothko’s writings on art, titled, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, as well as having recently purchased Kazimir Malevich’s, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Supremetism. Franz Kline’s black and whites left a bold impression on me, too.
Just as well, I was deeply involved with a study of Chinese landscape painting at The Metropolitan Museum of art which taught me two things: what is left out, spare, and minimal is just as important as what is present in a painting. And both Asian landscape painting and philosophy picture man within nature not separate from it. In a late Ming handscroll, the rock leans right and the figures bend right, as flow the moss and trees. Being part of nature man is observed in unison with all things. A few words from the early seventeenth century Chinese landscape painter T’ang Chih-ch’i help to describe the feeling, “Brushwork pertains to the refined, untrammeled style and spirit, which should be harmonious, pure, and agreeable.”
I was at the tail end of my graduate studies at Hunter College, City University of New York when I was showing my earliest ventures into this body of work in the fall of ‘05 (the works on paper) and the spring of ’06 to mixed reviews. While in school I was mostly working out my ideas through small scale works on paper and through a handful of larger paintings that formed my thesis exhibition. It wasn’t until the summer of ’06, post-schooling, that I began the series of eight refined black and grey paintings.
In my reading during that time, I came across passages such as these that resonated deep within me...
“To him [the Kwakiutl artist] a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable.”
–Barnett Newman
“When an artist becomes aware of his exact function, that is when he knows, suddenly, exactly what he will do and how he will do it. We say that he has attained to his vision.”
–Agnes Martin
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.
–Lao Tzu
“[…] understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.”
–Chuang Tzu
“[…] we cannot duplicate the statement of a painting into words. We can only hope to arouse with our words a train of similar associations, but these are subjective to the spectator and in no way duplicate the original statement.”
–Mark Rothko
“By “Suprematism” I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.”
–Kazimir Malevich
The paintings in this series, in my mind, reflect these sentiments. They came into being after a long sojourn into the mind and heart of working nonobjectively, that is, after looking inward for a time and not to the world of things. Therefore, I feel that the paintings not only reflect these thoughts and states of being, but successfully represent a tradition of belief in painting as a discipline dedicated to such notions of philosophical, spiritual, and formal understanding. I want to be clear in my notes at this time that black is not hate, it is love, and grey is softness and purity.
I am not the first to reduce a painting to a singular shape within the bounds of a square, but I am the first to do it in this manner. And what I realize now, some twenty-one years later, is that I am comfortable saying as much, whereas, had the paintings been shown upon their initial creation, my ego at the time may have undone me. So, in this sense, I’m glad the paintings have aged and renewed themselves with this opportunity for display. And, I have been glad to venture into their technique and mindset once again in order to continue to produce more paintings of this kind in my way.
Having revisited them, it was necessary that the paintings be finished similarly. The black areas were painted by using Flashe, a vinyl-based paint that also dries matte and is soluble in water. Now, years later it is widely heralded by painters of all kinds. Oil has a glossier satin sheen at times. The interior grey shapes were painted using thin layers of acrylic over an absorbent ground medium. And in terms of process and feeling I held onto this studio note written during the creation of the original eight paintings in 2006."
“I am going ahead with a series that, from what I can now tell (three paintings in), only changes with shape from piece to piece. Ground, brushwork, and color (black and grey) are constant. The surface is layered using similar repetitive strokes with the same size and style of brush. Each is made using equal amounts and values of black. Each painting is 6’ x 6’.
What I am seeking is to realize my response to the work when all remains the same outside of the expression of shape. With each piece comes a different feeling, though I have not yet experienced them hanging as a group. I will name the series “The Inner Chapters”.”
"The Inner Chapters, the summary title for the works, is named after Chuang Tzu’s writings which consist of seven inner chapters famous for their use of metaphor, parable, and anecdote. But I want to be clear that, to me, the paintings don’t read this way through metaphor, parable, or anecdote. I am of the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. The paintings are a one-to-one encounter to me and are not valued through associations of this kind. In person, they are pure felt experience."
In concurrence with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work with an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.
