“Process, Procedure, Presence”
Creativity as a concept pulls truth from both the left and right sides of the universe; it’s a little magic and a little mechanics. Some artists skew towards raw, Promethean creativity, and others toward more iterative or rule-based modes. There’s no right answer because art has “answers.” But while an artist’s journey has no destination; they will tell you there’s a place, or “pocket,” that combines the perfect ratios of left/right; objective/subjective; imagination/planning; and conscious/subconscious thinking. And while in that place, making artwork feels like ecstasy. It feels like it’s making itself, and that the artist becomes almost a pure medium.
The artists in “Process, Procedure, and Presence” each live and make right down the middle of this wonderful artistic duality, producing magical and uncanny objects combining rules and techniques with inspired and dreamy visions. Each piece in the show is part chemistry and part alchemy, arriving at the most fertile place in the universe: the edge of two things that don’t ever resolve.
Gray Room
by Walter Biggs
The painter and critic Michael Brennan described the process in Biggs’ work, noting how it reminded him of an episode of Cosmos in which Carl Sagan mixed an impromptu “batter” of the raw elements present in every human body. When it failed to create life, Sagan dramatically read lines from Genesis to suggest that life is more than a sum of parts. Brennan recalled that this other something, this “whole beyond the parts,” reminded him of Biggs’ work. In a word, the work is “exquisite.”
Exquisite is an overused word in the world of pop esthetics. But if it applies to anything, it applies to the art of Walter Biggs. Biggs’ complement of material mastery, visual sensitivity, and innovative application combine to produce objects that beg the term. But the road to making takes both time and revelation. Before he or any artist can begin the journey toward such a distinction, they must have first some idea of what’s possible…where to aim their imaginations in the hope of stumbling upon something wonderful. It requires trained eyes and minds to know where to start looking in the first place. An unwise seer would miss the exquisite if they tripped on it. So, long before that trip begins, the artist builds worlds of potentiality in their mind.
Walter Biggs isn’t only an example of this idea; he’s an embodiment. His appreciation of all that is weird, strange, unique, and beautiful in the world affects and is affected by the gorgeously uncanny objects he makes. It’s all of a piece, and one can sense it in the paintings. His rubbed, brushed, lumped, troweled, accumulated, and sanded graphite paintings float between the terrestrial and the celestial as easily as his painting process moves between made and the discovered. They’re stardust and carbon at the same time, always reminding us that ordinary material is finally spun into its final extraordinariness by an artist who intuitively expected it long before it arrived.
Walter Biggs received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1990. He currently lives and works in Harlem. His work has been exhibited at Momenta Art, Philadelphia, PA and Newburgh, NY; Trans-Hudson Gallery, NJ, and NY; Sperone Westwater, NY; Lesley Heller, NY; Galleria Milleventi, Milan; Galleria Cardi, Milan, Museo D'Arte della Citta de Ravenna, Ravenna, among others.
