QuintGallery.com

QUINT: Three Decades of Contemporary Art

at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum

August 15 – December 31, 2009

Special preview Saturday, August 15th from 6 – 9PM

340 N. Escondido Blvd.
Escondido, CA 92025
www.artcenter.org

Cocktails, hors d’ oeuvres, entertainment & live music.
$10 per person for non-members, free to Center Members.

RSVP to (760) 839-4120

The California Center for the Arts, Escondido Museum is pleased to present Quint: Three Decades of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, based on the program of one of San Diego County’s most influential galleries, will open on August 15th and continue through December 31st, 2009. Works in the exhibition, the majority of which have been borrowed from Southern California museums and private collections, present an extraordinary survey of the range of regional, national, and international artists supported and promoted by Quint Gallery over nearly thirty years.

Since opening his first gallery in La Jolla in 1981, Mark Quint adopted a unique, almost nomadic approach to the business of contemporary art. Rather than establishing itself in a permanent location and then expanding over time, Quint Gallery would more often adapt its spaces and program according to the needs of the artists it was interested in presenting. From formal gallery and raw open spaces in downtown San Diego, to large industrial workspaces for artists near Miramar Naval Air Base, to unexpected (and often elegant) spaces secluded in back alleys in Hillcrest or La Jolla, Quint Gallery has maintained the flexibility to represent artists employing a wide variety of practices, mediums, and formats.

Ruth Pastine works with ideas about color, primaries and secondaries, and through her process of layering, creates beautifully saturated canvases.

Ruth Pastine, excerpt from statement for Red-Green Yellow-Magenta, 2000

When I began this body of work I wanted to paint the archetypal “Red” and “Green” paintings. Red and green are the complementary colors which possess the closest value contrast giving the greatest retinal vibration. After completing them, I continued to search through numerous combinations of these two colors for “nameless” color events. My investigations in any body of work is always to discover through my process that which I haven’t experienced before. My pursuit proceeded to explore how far red I could venture into green to chance letting go of the recognition of “red,” and likewise how green could I venture into red and still name “green” and lose “green” altogether. The Red-Green body of work encompasses many paintings most of which the colors “red” and “green” are unidentifiable. I wanted to let go of being able to name the hue of the painting so that the light of the piece became its signifier.

Each body of paintings works within a complementary color structure. These two colors represent the outer ends of my palette and a gateway for departure. They set the parameters of the vast arena I work within, and act as a springboard for endless possibility. My inquiry is to make boundless that which seems finite. It is within given margins that my search can be limitless. Within the scope of a chosen palette my process ventures to explore the physical, retinal, and perceptual phenomena of color and light. The breadth of a body of work is completely organic. Usually a transitional painting crosses the threshold between palettes which inspires the evolution of a new body of work and closes the previous one.

The paintings although visually seamless, are made up of thousands of daubs of paint. The surfaces are active, tracing the evolution of every layer of the paintings and revealing the resonance of an interior radiant light. The paintings are about the truth of perception which reveals itself in time.