Continuing through February 25, 2017
Justin Margitich's medium-scale abstractions seduce with a vibrancy borne out of the vocabulary of digital imagery, no Photoshopping required. Fast-moving gradations amid dynamically intersecting and overlapping patterns bear traces of digitally produced compositions. Yet they were apparently created improvisationally, sans the predictability of a design program. More than half of the 19 paintings incorporate wet-on-wet watercolor patterns intertwined with hard-edged gradations. These watercolor and acrylic pieces, made on paper, are then mounted to panel, which from a painter's perspective might feel like a stain on the object's integrity, as if watercolor and digital themed abstraction were irreconcilable. It's a fact you may not want to be aware of, and may have you gravitating towards the direct-to-panel acrylic and graphite works. Meanwhile, the ultimate sign of the show's digital fluidity is that the paintings read better online than in person. Artie Vierkant, an artist whose oeuvre includes numerous works meant to exist only in online form and who tests the limits of intellectual property ownership, would be proud of his prescience.
