(1972, New York, US)
Oliver Vernon received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 1995, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited his work in cities all across the United States including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago, and has also shown in London and Toronto. His work is part of numerous collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Visually, Vernon’s paintings draw upon an incredibly varied pool of influences, from abstract expressionism, to post pop surrealism and the polished finish of figurative realism. Formally, his work is about the deconstruction, and hence the necessary reconstruction of visual space. From this central dichotomy stems many others: logic/illogic, physical/metaphysical, imprisonment/liberation. His paintings come to us, perhaps, as detailed snapshots of the few primordial milliseconds when the blueprint of the universe was being sculpted from the final throes of chaos. In this sense, anything goes.
Each painting has it’s own set of rules, or rather the rules are being bent, broken and ultimately formed within each painting. Color, form, energy, architecture, good, evil, flesh and machine are lurking, never as physical entities, but as transient archetypes searching out their final places within the framework of the cosmos. Apart from this macro view, Oliver’s work can be seen at the micro level as well. We can view his paintings as representations of how the mind is formed from a foundation of thought, reason, and aesthetics, and how these entities are simultaneously at odds and interconnected.
Watch this video of his exhibition "Renegade Trajectories" by Colin M Day:
Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Renegade Trajectories, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Oliver Vernon. This is Vernon’s third solo show with the gallery, and the artist will be present at the opening reception on May 30. Combining elements of landscape painting, figuration, and abstraction, Vernon’s practice pushes all of these categories beyond easy distinction, creating a hybrid visual language all his own. “The picture plane is a continuum of give and take,” says Vernon, “where positive and negative space give way to each other in rhythmic intervals. Energy oscillates and migrates, initiating changes along the way. And color is a navigational tool to guide the eye through the chaotic scape.” In Renegade Trajectories, Vernon explores this dynamic with twelve medium-sized acrylic on linen or canvas paintings and a suite of twelve ink on paper works. The exhibition will showcase several large-scale paintings, the largest measuring nearly 8-x-7 feet. In the painting Excavation, a jagged cyclone of geometric shapes, architectural elements, and quasi-anatomical forms swirl about a distant horizon, pulling it in or ushering it forth. In the dramatic painting Flashback, this force takes the form of an orange and violet-tinted flood, inundating the picture with a chaotic rush of brushstrokes, graphic patterns, and semi-figurative material. As the artist notes, “These incidents or events take place in worlds within worlds. Everything is whirring with activity as parts of systems engage with other systems in a state of constant flux.” May 30 to June 29, 2013 www.joshualinergallery.com www.oliververnon.com