Stanley Casselman “143 miles per second”

Jim Kempner Fine Art presents 143 miles per second, Stanley Casselman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The two-floor exhibition features a comprehensive selection of the artist’s most recent Luminor paintings.

The newest paintings in Casselman’s Luminor-8 series demonstrate his expanding vocabulary in abstraction through the use of a squeegee. The title, 143 miles per second, refers to the speed at which our solar system rotates around the center of our galaxy and points to the omnipresence of motion, which is the central theme in this body of work. Casselman’s subject matter is the universe and our physical and temporal reality. The work is directly related to the forces of nature, such as gravity, plate tectonics and speed.
Casselman applies acrylic paint to canvas with brushes, squeegees and directly from the tube. The artist builds up a surface with layers of paint, only to destroy and unearth what lies beneath. The nuances of curvilinear lines and brushstrokes in these Luminors differ from his earlier, less gestural, IR paintings. Also on display are Casselman’s completely new monochromatic paintings. These paintings are an exploration in how the multiplicity of overlapping hues can, as Casselman describes it, “create a vast visual symphony”. The monochromatic paintings are the only paintings the artist ever produced without the use of white.

The palpability of movement and surface tension is visible in Luminor-8-11. Casselman painted random swirls of black and white over a blue underpainting. A final pass of the squeegee left large rifts in the surface. The result, as Casselman puts it, is “pure physics – random elements and semi-predictable ones.” Luminor-8-16 unveils the dynamic space that unfurls when vertical passes of the squeegee are placed over horizontal passes. Similarly, Luminor-8-5 plays cascading greens against horizontal strokes of hot red to arrive at a seemingly luminescent repose. Casselman’s work reveals a deft painter who celebrates the unknown and the interconnectedness of fortuity and existence.

Stanley Casselman was born in 1963, and lives and works in New York City. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and in Europe. His work is in the collections of the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art of Bologna and numerous private collections.

Carter Ratcliff is an art critic, author, and poet. His books on art include The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996); Robert Longo (Rizzoli, 1985); Andy Warhol: Portraits (Phaidon Press, 2007), and John Singer Sargent (Abbeville Press, 1982).