![\"One](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Malone_OneDay_12x12.jpg\")
<\/a>One Day by Dave Malone, 12″ x 12″<\/p><\/div>\n
One of the most interesting phenomena learned from my perspective is how the getting comfortable period \u2014 that part of the process prior to accomplishment, when there is a state of disarray \u2014 can be quite a beautiful thing.\u00a0 This was noticed with \u201cOne Day,\u201d a painting I described to Malone as a cacophony of linear shape with no resemblance to anything, set at unusual angles, with flatness here and depth there, and a blending of earthy color with no regularity or apparent rhyme or reason of any sort \u2014 one might even call the construct of linear structure and color wash form an arbitrariness.\u00a0 But isn\u2019t this a beautiful idea, to be so detached from the realms of purpose, to be so liberated from reason, to be totally free from realization, to where the painting exists purely on its own merit, with a cacophony that is beautiful in its disunity, and disheveled state?<\/p>\n
Malone was surprised by this observation and mentioned how he had always sought within his structure and form to find the opposite of cacophony, a symphony.\u00a0 My realization is that the symphony is easy.\u00a0 It has long been accomplished innumerable times by innumerable great artists of all types, but for a cacophony to be truly beautiful, and not just a bad attempt at art, this is a rare thing indeed.\u00a0 It takes an artist who is also detached, who is completely liberated, and someone so free as to be indefinable; someone very much an artist.<\/p>\n
Malone\u2019s most current work is more of a hybridization than his past work, and has a look that is ironically more attached to the past, but has the zeitgeist of the present.\u00a0 While previous works, with their minutia of color washes, looked much like Helen Frankenthaler\u2019s or Lee Deffebach\u2019s, the newer works function with the distinctive reality of the neo-Modern, which plays with the abstract forms of the twentieth century, but leaves behind utopian visions and quests for visual purity and becomes grounded in subjective iconography.<\/p>\n
For the abstraction of Malone, and for most good abstractionists today, there requires a touchstone, a signifier of some sort that designates it as<\/i> today \u2014\u00a0 be it a circle, a repeated gesture, a certain use of a particular color regularly or in anyway implicitly, any shape that might look iconic, or the line that is ubiquitous in Malone\u2019s work, as are also hollowed out spheres or amorphous form or repetition of stripes. Malone\u2019s paintings may have essences of Frankenthaler, or the playfulness of Klee but they are not grounded on form alone or structure alone; this is not the High Modern, this is contemporary neo-Modern and something very different.\u00a0 Contemporary abstraction may have much to do with the past but is a new entity today in a world that has done a number of 360\u2019s since the days of the Abstract Expressionists and post-Painterly-Abstractionists.<\/p>\n Emergence by Dave Malone, watercolor on paper, 22″ x 30″<\/p><\/div>\n The magnificent \u201cEmergence,\u201d with its heavy centralized darker wash, has the essence of a Motherwell in its heaviness, or a Klein in its dark gesture.\u00a0 This dark heaviness bleeds into vivid yellows and in some areas can be found silver blue, even pink.\u00a0 Yet the neo-Modernism is phenomenologically granted by the needlepoint sharp line that winds its way through it like a gentle cocoon as certain areas of closed shape encapsulating color. \u00a0\u201cUntitled 004\u201d and \u201cUntitled 002\u201d each assume a distinctive regularity in their abstraction.\u00a0 \u201cUntitled 004\u201d uses a width of vertical bands of citrus yellow full of play with the element of the water in the color and the saturated water that spreads around this rhythm of vertical bands of unevenly placed, spaced, toned, and hued color, creating a faint aureole around the centralized form.\u00a0 The very same phenomena occur for \u201cUntitled 002,\u201d yet in black, eliciting an entirely different receptivity to the form.\u00a0 \u201cUntitled 007\u201d and \u201cUntitled 005\u201d are both very tersely painted watercolors with little play of color except for gradation of the hue within the form.\u00a0 Each of these forms is tightly centralized, \u201cUntitled 007\u201d being a rust tone that is vertical, \u201cUntitled 005\u201d being black that is horizontal.\u00a0 Each are acutely nebulous with evenly spaced, evenly structured rings of space left open within these nebula, yet each of the rings have been allowed to be saturated by watered hue to varying degrees, to a point almost of obscurity.\u00a0 The color, the placement, the iconography, each allows for a different response such as mood or cognitive association that is utterly distinctive for each.<\/p>\n<\/a>