PIETER VERMEERSCH: (((( ))))

Perrotin is pleased to present (((()))), a solo exhibition by Pieter Vermeersch, who returns to the New York gallery after five years.

January 11 - February 19, 2025

This new exhibition extends his ongoing exploration of materiality, time, space and color, incorporating gradient paintings on canvas, semi-precious stones, and silkscreen techniques. The exhibition scenography is precise, actively inviting the onlooker to move through the galleries as a passage: the architecture of the space and the works inside it combine, folding together discrete works of different scales and contrasting materials.

Vermeersch’s particular methodology and the viewer’s experience of the works are not in direct conceptual correspondence as they usually are when considering more familiar studies of color in painting of say the 1960s. The finely graduated, diffuse color and smooth, immaculately rendered oil surface is the result of a painstaking procedure of reproducing in paint photographic images of light and spatial conditions falling across a flat surface. It is a demystified, entirely comprehensible process, unlike the exuberant, and sublime, effect of the paintings.

The evident contradiction between objective making and viewing is one of the many productive aporias arising in this exhibition. The oil paintings on canvas here all feature a tonally lighter horizontal at the vertical mid-point of the canvas. The color radiates unevenly, recalling the ethereal spatial effects of light at either low levels or high intensities. The larger paintings are immersive, their height at over 90 inches well above the on looker’s own height.

To Vermeersch, the experience of painting is still a powerful sensory and philosophical encounter, but one that is rooted in a desire to work with the contradictions of perception and matter, temporality and space, and the resulting beauty that through painting is released.