Paintings 2022-2023
Joe Wardwell's work is built from many layers, combining landscape imagery with text and abstraction. While pushing against each other, the various elements create tension and energy that result in the artist's unique visually complex paintings. The abstract, the landscape, and the text imagery are as much at odds with each other as they are striving for visual harmony.
In his recent paintings featured in this exhibition, Wardwell continues to work with excerpts taken from song lyrics, Hudson River School inspired landscapes and geometric abstraction. Adding an additional element of intricacy, the artist's elaborate and highly original process involves layering of acrylic paint, building depth of color and image through spraying, stenciling, and silkscreening. The application of paint draws inspiration from techniques of hard-edge abstracted painting, silkscreen posters, stencil graffiti, Japanese wood block techniques, and traditional easel painting. The paintings embody a tension within themselves through the process of covering, painting over, and then revealing. Avoiding any hierarchy across the imagery, the combination of multiple techniques and genres leads to a dynamic language that defies the norms of each.
Joe Wardwell comments on social constructs and societal problems through the mingling of text and landscape. In the past, themes regarding our environmental impact, and notions of social justice were predominant. In this most recent body of work, the phrases focus on political divisions in the United States and pandemic/post-pandemic anxieties. Statements like Have No Time for Love or Hate, What is Strange Right Now, or Want Good Time mimic advertising but at the same time undermine the overall message, almost like botched self-help posters from a dystopic future. These phrases are overlaid with the acidy colors of complex geometric abstraction and both reveal and obscure iconic sun drenched landscapes.