Stanley Casselman
15 Degrees of Entropy
March 13 - April 24, 2021
Installation View: Stanley Casselman, 15 Degrees of Entropy
Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present 15 Degrees of Entropy, a solo show by the New York-based artist Stanley Casselman. The exhibition features his most recent large-scale paintings, each a quintessential representation of his iconic abstract style of painting. Abiding a rigorous process that consists of pulling layers of paint onto and through a polyester mesh fabric, Casselman creates works in an almost futuristic mode. That is, his luminous and torrential surfaces represent a paradigm shift away from the brush: while they are certainly gestural abstractions, it’s unclear to the eye just what kind of gesture could produce the aqueous and rhythmic patterns.
Casselman’s process is one of contradiction; it reconciles skill with randomness, and control with chance. Wearing white coveralls, a hair net and working in an immaculately cleaned studio space, the artist pours pools of paint on the top edge of the polyester, pulls a mammoth self-designed tool called a “flat bar spreader” from top to bottom, and repeats the process to add layers. From layer to layer––and sometimes even within a single “run” over the surface––he will change the angle and/or pressure of the device. Along with the volume of paint poured at the edge, it is this carefully honed technique of the “pull” that renders the pulsing meter of the paintings’ surfaces.
15 Degrees of Entropy, the title of the show, refers both to the technical nature of this process (for many layers, the flat bar spreader either starts or ends at a 15-degree angle to the surface) as well as the paradox therein. “My paintings,” the artist says, “exist at the edge of order and disorder.” On the one hand, Casselman’s is an almost surgically precise process; he orchestrates his environment and manipulates the device to exercise control over the creative act. Yet it is the act of mark-making that also gives way to disorder, to the unpredictability of paint. In other words, to entropy.
Visceral and unrepeatable, each painting stands as a physical record of its own creation—both embodying and describing the physical processes and possibilities of material. Yet they also seem to defy the physical, to move beyond it. The alchemical quality of Casselman’s surfaces invite spiritual contemplation, and like any spiritual undertaking, there exists also a degree of inaccessibility; their surfaces induce a sense of unanswerable wonder, which in our technological landscape is an increasingly rare commodity.
Casselman (born in Phoenix, AZ) received his Bachelor of Arts from Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and museums including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Gazelli Art House, Baku, Azerbaijan and London, UK; James White Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA; and Brintz Galleries, Palm Beach, FL. His works are part of the collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, among others.
