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"Ginevra de' Benci #6" Oil on canvas 30" x 24" 2011
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What I like about these paintings is how they take an important and early early impetus for abstraction and turn it on its head. From it's very beginning and running through such diverse movements as abstract expressionism and color field paintings, abstraction was all about abandoning the illusion of depth, flattening the canvas as it were acknowledging that painting is a 2-dimensinal art form. Shane Guffog's work embraces the illusion of depth, but does so without resorting to outright representation. The paintings are built up slowly in varnished layers through rhythmic repetitive brush strokes. The varnished layers give the work a luminous depth (like the sky of a Maxfield Parrish painting (about as polar opposite from twentieth century abstraction as it is possible to get). This also heightens the three dimensional illusion, while the rhythmic brushwork seems to suggest mathematical ideas of stochasticity and chaos theory.
You can see more at the artist's website: www.shaneguffogg.com
or at: Leslie Sacks Fine Arts
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