Structure and Imagery: Rob de Oude

Showing posts with label Rob de Oude. Show all posts

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Between the Eyes @ Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN

Rubens Ghenov and Marina Adams

Rob de Oude, Laurel Sucsy, and Rubens Ghenov

From the Press Release:

Crosstown Arts is pleased to present "Between the Eyes," a group show about contemporary abstract painting and how we see it.

Just as the relationships of pitch and duration can express emotion in music, the formal relationships of hue, value, shape, and placement can collect to create meaning in abstract painting. Featuring the work of six painters exploring distinct modes of abstraction, the exhibition examines the way each artist uses deliberate choices to engage us in the experience of looking. Formal cues such as gesture, color and the use of found objects prompt us to recognize patterns and attribute meaning to certain behaviors. Physicality contends with the pictorial as we both decipher and project meaning into the space of abstract forms.

A short video interview with curator, Laurel Sucsy.

Rubens Ghenov, Marina Adams, Rob de Oude, Laurel Sucsy, Rubens Ghenov, and Iva Gueorguieva

Marina Adams, Four Worlds, 2013, oil and acrylic on panel, 74 x 74 in.

Iva Gueorguieva and Joe Fyfe

Rob de Oude, Fanning a Recurring Past, 2012, Oil and acrylic on panel, 16 x 16 in.

Laurel Sucsy, Untitled, 2015 oil on linen, 20 x 16 in.

Iva Gueorguieva and Joe Fyfe

Between the Eyes

curated by Laurel Sucsy

Featuring work by New York-based artists Marina Adams, Rob de Oude, and Joe Fyfe; LA-based artist Iva Gueorguieva; Philadelphia-based artist Rubens Ghenov; and Laurel Sucsy of Memphis.

On view through May 16, 2015

Crosstown Arts

422 North Cleveland

Memphis, TN

Review by Frederic Koeppel

Review by Eileen Townsend

*images by Ben Butler

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Territory of Abstraction @ Pentimenti

Pentimenti Gallery

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Rob de Oude @ Galerie Gourvennec Ogor

Double Cross, 2012, colored pencil on paper, 8 x 8 in.

Mi O Minus, 2012, oil on panel, 14 x 14 in.

Mono Para, 2012, oil on panel, 14 x 14 in.

Orange Realigned, 2012, oil on panel, 16 x 16 in.

From the press release:

Rob de Oude makes straight lines bend. He achieves this perceptual effect through a rigorous and meticulous painting process, layering and weaving matrices of straight lines until, between the contrasting colors and crisscrossing patterns, grids begin to bow and warp. This visual slight, a more painterly and maximalist type of Op art, tricks the eye through sheer ocular overload. In an age of unabated visional stimulation, these super-imposed networks speak of digital delirium, increased connectivity between disparate points and, perhaps most crucially, unbridled visual pleasure.

Much like a web — whether of fiber-optic cables or spider-spun silk — de Oude’s compositions have a seductive power that’s difficult to escape. Indeed, each piece reveals more of itself the longer viewers’ eyes remain caught in its patterns. The many precise and overlapping threads begin to separate and become distinct, previously unnoticed hues emerge, and the compositions seem to shape-shift and spin as viewers parse the works’ optical static. The latticework of lineaments slowly reveals its inner logic.

De Oude’s paintings demand contemplative and close engagement beyond their immediately gripping visual tricks. Looking at a piece can induce a trance-like immersion not unlike his painting process. A surprisingly simple rig with clamps and ruled edges allows for an infinite variety of fine lines applied in dozens of layers over a base of airbrushed neon clouds. By juxtaposing contrasting hues, he builds up a complex mesh whose individual strands can only be teased out on close inspection.

For his exhibition at Galerie Gourvennec Ogor, de Oude will be showcasing four series of works, two of which are recent developments in his practice and feature the tilted perspectives that give the show its title. In addition to sets of large canvases and wall pieces, he has begun experimenting with rotated canvases for his newest and brightest medium-sized paintings. Full of competing shapes and shifting colors, these canted works throw the composition further off balance, suggesting new potential horizons. And in sharp contrast to recent pieces dominated by Day-Glo blues, lime greens and radioactive yellows, de Oude has pared down his palette to create his first series of monochrome paintings. Without the complex interplay of colors, these works focus attention on line and geometry in a manner that evokes the likes of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely.

In all four series featured here, however, de Oude demonstrates his prodigious talent for turning rigid grids into enveloping nets. What he calls attention to, above all else, is how willingly our eyes can be seduced from linear ways of thinking and looking into swirling patterns of color and webs of lines designed to ensnare vision. As we let ourselves become lost in the grids, like optical flâneurs wandering a boundless maze, previously invisible images shift into focus.

Rob de Oude was born in the Netherlands and studied at Amsterdam’s Hoge School voor de Kunsten and SUNY Purchase in New York. He currently lives in Brooklyn and has his studio in Queens, where he is also the co-director of the gallery Parallel Art Space.