• ERIK WENZEL: BELIEF IN DOUBT IN PAINTING

  • February 20 - March 21, 2009
  • Opening Reception: Friday, February 20 (7-10PM)

  • 65GRAND is pleased to present Erik Wenzel in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. Wenzel's multi-media installations are meditations on the act of painting and its relative worth.

  • A critic of some stature in his own right, Wenzel characterizes his work as both smart and stupid. One could also add the pairing serious and silly to the list, and his grouping of white canvas boards ringing a white room, with KLF's album The White Room thumping away in the background, initiates the blurring of boundaries between these sets of dichotomies.

  • At first glance, these canvases may appear uniform in their finish, but a closer inspection reveals the various wrappings and finishes each board has received. Some bear solely the manufacturers base coat of white, some Wenzel has hand painted white and still others are shrink wrapped with white painted over the plastic. All of the boards bear binder clips clutched to their top most edges which don't function to affix them in any way to the walls, balanced as they are on a gleaming, anodized aluminum shelves that encircle the space. Without being up there, flat and flush, against the walls planar surface, and instead leaning thinly, at an angle to it, they take on a more sculptural shape. And as they tilt back into the wall, they enter into a whispered conversation with it that runs something like, "What's the difference between white paintings and white walls? Between painting a canvas white and painting a wall white?"

  • The absolute blankness of the space is broken up by the early 90's rave music, infusing it with a reverse Rothko chapel aura. Instead of being ensconced by dark, deep space behemoths, its propped up panels appear to be protracting out of the white walls they're balanced against. And in the next room, a video of his feline surrogate creates, not without some coaxing, a generic, primary colored gestural abstraction.

  • Wenzel's backwards glance to Modernism (in this case to Robert Ryman's Elliot Room) is made only in order to engage it, and then incorporate elements of it into his forward looking 21st century projects. He makes art about art, and what it means to be an artist, with a bittersweet twist, as he finds himself in the double bind of believing in his love of painting, but doubting the very validity of painting itself. Rather than allow his critical and philosophical bent to mire him down in a heady inertia, he gropes his way, giggling, through the morass of post-modernity. His work laughs along with us, and sometimes at us, and laughs also in place of crying.

  • Erik Wenzel earned his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Chicago. In 2009 he exhibited at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, as part of the National Graduate Art Survey. He has also exhibited at mini dutch gallery, Chicago in 2008, and Fifty50 & ButcherShop Dogmatic, Chicago in 2007. Wenzel's criticism has appeared in ARTslant and Time Out, and is founder and director of the blog Art or Idiocy?.