AARON FINK

SAIL ON

Aaron Fink: Sail OnMay 21 - June 14

Opening ReceptionSaturday, May 21

3pm - 5pm

Alpha Gallery37 Newbury St

Boston, MA 02116617-536-4465 / alphagallery.com

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Lotus, 2011, oil on panel, 30x40 inches (detail)

Aaron FinkNew Work/New World

By Patricia G. Berman

If a honeybee could paint, if it could express how overwhelmingly monumental the world appeared in relation to its tiny body, if it could somehow capture the dynamic complexity of color and texture as reg-istered by the thousands of cells in its compound eyes, its work might look a little like Aaron Fink’s new paintings.

Objects, from cheeseburgers to magnolia blossoms, assume a hyper monumentality, looming large in their isolating, rectangular environ-ments. The thick contours of these hypertrophic objects vibrate with traces of paint from the backgrounds that comb through them, and from color dragged from their luscious centers that explode outward.

Fink’s surfaces -- thick with paint trowelled on, scraped, smoothed wet-on-wet, squeegeed, and frottaged into foamy peaks -- are peeled or stripped away, revealing layer upon layer of color and form. Fore- and backgrounds merge in unexpected ways as the animated paint layers blend and unfold.

Cappuccino, 2011, oil on panel, 11x14 inches (detail)

Blueberry Pie, 2010, oil on panel, 18x24 inches

Paradoxically, the closer the objects appear, through their massive scale, the less familiar they become, and the harder they are to see as integrated objects amidst their cascading layers of paint. The honeybee cannot, of course, manage the herculean task of such lyrical painting. Yet the course of that insect’s eccentric, swooping flight, and the effect of its many eyes, each registering a different plane and perspective, offer a metaphor for the ways in which Aaron Fink sees, freshly and from manifold perspectives. His subjects swell sculpturally in space, and space itself becomes a strangely materialized and navigable substance.

Aaron Fink has for years meditated on vernacular objects, granting them monu-mental presence through his close-up attentiveness and his deployment of animated painting techniques. Often, his subjects, such as hats, fruit, or flowers, are also lifted from old master paintings. In the current body of work, a spotted orchid and a sequence of magnolia blossoms are reminiscent of Frederick Edwin Church’s recordings of floral exotica, only now rendered fluid and tumescent.

Spotted Orchid, 2010, oil on linen, 60x48 inches

Popcorn (2010) and Popcorn (Holbein), from 2011, anthropomorphize, and ren-der strange, the normally cheerful little fluffy new world food. The normally banal kernel of corn, exploded from within, appears in Popcorn to transmute into skull-like nodes, their contours sculpturally defined by black contour lines. It is evidence of the artist looking so hard and so long at a kernel of popcorn that he has discovered within it an associational link with Hans Hol-bein’s freakily elusive anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors (1533).

Popcorn (Holbein) offers a further uncanny meditation on this tiny consumable in which the kernel, in its roseate and venous fleshiness, becomes humanoid. A meeting of Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cast (1895) and Francis Ba-con’s Painting (1946), the popped corn is animated both through Fink’s eru-dite art-historical references and his magisterial movement of paint. Blown up to three feet by over four feet in size, the evanescent popcorn kernel has become a memento mori. Its organic form is punctuated by a gestural grid and bracketed by arenas of color that articulate both a low-lying horizon and an opening into a deep blue vista, both microscopic and cosmic. A blueberry pie, resting on a Matisse-like patterned ground, becomes apocalyptic. An ice cream cone becomes an agent of the sublime, its massive volcanic form dis-sipating into darkness.

In acts of perception acute enough to be rendered by a bee and recorded by brushes laden by both luscious paint and by history, Aaron Fink makes the familiar enticing, intimate, and otherworldly.

Patrica G. Berman is a Boston-based writer, art critic and professor of art history at Wellesley College and the University of Olso, Norway.

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Hot Magnolia, 2011, oil on panel, 11x14 inches (detail)

Popcorn, 2010, oil on linen, 40x50 inches

Italian Loaf, 2010, oil on linen, 36x72 inches

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Profiteroles, 2011, oil on panel, 18x24 inches

Vanilla, 2011, oil on panel, 20x16 inches

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White Magnolia, 2011, oil on panel, 16x20 inches

Aaron Fink(Born in Boston, 1955)

Selected Museum CollectionsArizon State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZArt Complex Museum, Duxbury, MAArt Institute of Chicago, Chicago, ILArthur J. Huntington Art Gallery,

University of Texas, Austin, TXAspen Institute, Aspen, COBoston Public Library, Boston, MABouwfonds Nederlandse Gemeenten, NetherlandsBrooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NYDanforth Museum, Framingham, MADanish House of Parliament, Copenhagen, DenmarkDavis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MADenver Museum of Art, Denver, COFarnsworth Museum, Farnsworth, MEFogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAFedrick Weisman Museum of Art,

University of MinnesotaFuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MAHara Museum, Tokyo, JapanIndianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, INLibrary of Congress, Washington, DCMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MAMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NYMuseum of Modern Art, New York, NYMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, ILMuseum of Fine Art, Boston, MANational Gallery of Art, Washington, DCNew York Public Library, New York, NYNorton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, FLPortland Museum of Art, Portland, MEPortland Museum of Art, Portland, ORSamuel P. Harn Museum, Gainesville, FLSanta Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NMSundance Institute, Provo, UTTufts University, Medford, MAUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst, MAWalker Art Center, Minneapolis, MNWorcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

MonographAaron Fink: Out of the Ordinary(Hard Press Editions) text: Eleanor Heartney230 pages, 203 color illustrations

EducationYale University, School of Art and Architecture, MFA 1979Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore BFA 1977

Alpha Gallery37 Newbury St

Boston, MA 02116617-536-4465

alphagallery.com

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Content © 2011 Aaron Fink, Alpha Gallery and Patricia G. BermanCatalog design by Nathaniel Fink