Feel Rabid or Not

Sept 17 - Nov 1, 2009
Galeria Moriarty, Madrid

Feel Rabid Or Not is a project conceived and carried out expressly for the Moriarty Gallery space.

Wendy White is in this sense an artist of radical viscerality. As she explains: 'I am addicted to that sense of collective emotion and explosive energy present in rock concerts and sports arenas. I believe that these moments of rarefied collective energy are close to the sensation that one feels when one fails or succeeds in a painting. It is something that can only be described with image and color; when you pay attention to what you feel and let yourself be carried away by the most visceral instinct. '

In the large pieces, White paints on several canvases that are added to each other according to the needs that appear in the composition process. With this, she can start the work without prior determination of scale, avoiding that the space of the canvas itself closes the intuitive resolution process.

'Leaving part of the canvas blank and untreated, generates an extension of the painting towards the wall and vice versa, and she proposes a relationship with architecture and sculpture. The 'empty' spaces become context for the painted marks and suggest that other configurations for the composition would exist if things moved, repositioned or fell. '

Wendy White de-centers and concentrates the image on intuitive sensations of gravity, pressure, weight, situation, accumulation, spillage and collection. By changing the speed of each layer of paint, she traps and makes the ambition of the process visible through a gestural narrative. Nothing is too anchored and everything is in danger of wobbling. Her stains come from graffiti, graphic art, DIY and abstraction, without hierarchies.

Looking for an echo in the notion that homework and play are interdependent, she asks: What does work really look like? What does covering or embellishing mean? What is cosmetic and what is structural?