The work of Garth Weiser (b. 1979, Helena, MT) is concerned with languages of abstraction and the physicality of the painted surface. Marked by a sense of materiality and texture, as well as a striking synthesis of addition and subtraction, Weiser’s densely textured oeuvre underlines the artist’s fascination with the evolution of painting. His work is created by overlaying abstraction upon abstraction, each unique layer representing a distinct history in terms of content, form and materiality, resulting in a gestural surface burnished with shimmering strata of thick pigment. Highly textured, his paintings resemble fossilised slabs, their facture near tangible to the viewer. The vascular surfaces of the works trigger chromatic vibrations and optical illusions. Multiple perspectives and after-images emerge and recede with tributaries feeding and looping back into one another, giving rise to a new and complex visual lexicon, rooted in the canon of abstract painting.
A departure from his early work, which demonstrated a strong interest in graphic and geometric design, drawing on elements of the Op Art movement, Weiser’s practice began to engage with composition, agency and intention, confronting abstract expressionistic tropes with the use of different effects, procedures and materials. In his most recent body of work, Weiser sources printed images from a wide array of art historical influences which he places on top of thick oil paint and mutilates with claw-like lacerations letting the underlying paint bleed through the surface, further enhancing the intertwined patterns caused by the vascular texture of the surging colours. Surfaces absorb light and reflect it unevenly, keeping the viewer mobile via optical instability and a lack of figure-ground distinctions. Blurring the line between painting and sculpture, the works are illusionistic, and shadows, gradations of colour, a sense of movement, variations between light and darkness, rippling waves, wood grain, and reverberating contours are evoked in the undulating palette and seismic surfaces of the artist’s multi-faceted practice. The final visual effect is akin to the slick of oil on water, or the wavering effects of a striped shirt viewed on a television screen.
