Fri, Oct 25, 2024 → Sat, Dec 21, 2024
I Want! I Want! is Jeffrey Dell’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The title refers to an engraving by William Blake from the book Gates of Paradise, which was published in 1793. The image depicts a person setting out to climb an impossibly long ladder that is leaning on the inside edge of a crescent moon. The small scale of the print, only 2 ½ x 2 inches, compels the viewer to lean in to make out the details of the lines in the night sky and the crisscrossing greys that create a slightly dizzying pattern. The image can be understood to express human curiosity and persistence in the face of what seems unattainable, about a longing to reach and understand the divine, the unknown, the unknowable, and the sublime
In a similar sense, Dell’s work shifts back and forth between representation and abstraction. The structures that he uses concurrently both do and do not represent specific imagery. While the flower and star forms are familiar objects, they also become opportunities to incorporate shapes that radiate an identifiable energy and indicate a certain directional movement, implying how to read the space
Color plays a central role in this new body of work, carrying the burden of meaning. Historically, color has had a tension of being understood as a material or as an energy. This goes back to Newton and Goethe, the former describing it as waves and the latter as more of a particle. Newton was seeing it from the perspective of physics, Goethe from that of an artist. Light waves do indeed have qualities of both waves and particles, but of course Newton was the correct one. Dell uses color to sometimes be one or the other, sometimes both, or sometimes in transition.
Color remains a potent element for intuitive, slippery meaning in visual art. Rather than being fixed or static, it is relational, dynamic, and dependent upon the viewer’s perceptions. One of the only art books in Dell’s childhood home was about Maxfield Parrish’s paintings. Parrish depicts a world that is perpetually in the Golden Hour of sunset in which figures lounge on classical stage sets bathed in atmospheric color. More recently, Thomas Kinkade has used atmospheric colors to play into humanity’s basic emotions, perhaps to the extent of sometimes pandering to the viewer. Dell’s color choices capture observable atmospheric phenomena embedded within ambiguous forms, merging painterly abstraction with the sort of fantastical realism found in Parrish’s work.
The idea of layering is equally fundamental to Dell’s work. This is partially the natural result of the mechanics of how a print is made—one layer at a time—but also the formal visual qualities in which one form or object overlaps and crops another, causing the viewer to read one object as being in front of another, creating depth and space. At the same time, Dell often flattens the colors and images to counter the implication of the overlapping forms. Any single move that seems to imply something specific can be accompanied by another that makes the implication impossible.
Artist Bio
Jeffrey Dell grew up on the west coast, mostly in Oregon. His studied ceramics at Hamline University, switching to works on paper just as he graduated. Dell was a two-year graduate assistant at Bucknell University, and then subsequently received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of New Mexico. He was a Fellow for two years at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, in Venice, IT. Since 2000 he has been area head of Printmaking at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. His work is in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art, as well as private and commercial collections nationally. He has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and abroad.
