Russell Tyler

Russell Tyler's paintings celebrate paintings history. He seamlessly combines  previously distinct painting lineages into a language all his own.  He begins with three major painterly characterizations of space: the cinematic, the theatrical, and the digital.  Working with a range of sizes, his surfaces are composed of densely layered color, texture and structure, highlighting a conceptual and material driven exploration of mark-making.  Tyler has two bodies of work - one is gestural, the other geometric.  In the former, wildly expressive paint handling meets a faint sense of structure. He applies thick impasto to create luminous fields, drips, and splotches of color.  His palette ranges from pastels, vivid neon, to deep blacks.  The edges are framed by thin rectangular bands of color.  These crisply painted bands border Tyler's highly expressive mark-making, rendering it frozen with a lingering sensation of movement.  These works are animated, raucous, recalling the near-violent masterworks of Abstract Expressionism re-envisioned with a conceptual edge.    His other body of work explores thickly painted, monochromatic rectangular forms that repeat and vary in scale.  He also uses a framing device of thinly painted bands in this series.  These repeating rectangular forms allow Tyler to  experiment with the relativity of color and how it changes through placement, interaction and density.  Joseph Albers chose his shapes to avoid symbolism.  In contrast, Tyler is interested in referencing technology, specifically how a computer screen sets up windows that open and collapse for access to information. These works are optical, revealing the psychological effects of color and how the screen has changed our reception of images.   Jason Stopa