Scott Pfaffman

Selected Works

May 17 - June 16

During a recent Friday evening the Andrew Logan Project space opened wide its doors to a fresh installation of the work of Scott Pfaffman. The crisp white interior is punched into the building facade like a die cut book, the colorful work within gleams beneath bright lights. On the rear wall is mounted vertically a large monitor alongside what appears to be an operator's station. The screen displays images harvested from the artist’s digital files that fade and flicker the data-driven graphics - a combination of video art and advertising billboard.  An obvious seduction.

Lured into the space like butterflies to a flower garden, the guests took passes through the grow room of lotus blossoms from the exceptionally well stocked bar mounted on the sidewalk. Inside the images and objects prove to be a seductive and somewhat sticky admixture. Eight large glorious drawings spray themselves onto unframed  panels attached in a continuous mural like 30 foot long ribbon. They declare a monumentality built from fragile suggestive marks combined with bold declarative gestures and a palette that ranges widely as though each work had its own colorist. Digesting this frieze would require a number of repeat flights. According to the artist the drawings were made in a three-month period beginning in October. His working method was to make each successive work as unlike its predecessor as possible and studiously avoid the obvious binary solutions. As a result of his efforts, there’s a Motherwell dictionary of shapes and gestures admitting a wide range of influences and derivations of modernist abstraction. They are joy filled celebrations and careful dissections; wholly attractive and simultaneously entertaining. Gesture, determined by the scale and the arc of the draughtsman’s arm. A neo natal sense of color, all these make this ensemble a huge success.

The colorist’s role is true of the small collages on the opposite wall which are so recent that the artist admitted they had been executed only last week. They speak to an intimate space to which the larger works have no access. Here the fragility of assemblage is a flotsam held together by some unseen attractive force between an accidental gestalt and found painting. Here also the artist has chosen to install two sculptures as a visual relief which interrupt muscularly and mechanically the delicate flowers. Meaning associates with form here in what I believe the artist's most cogent work. The sculptures are from Pfaffman's recent and not so recent sculptural past. (1991 and 2016).

Next along the north wall a corporate office reception room is recreated in a large framed nightmare, a monstrosity depicting the raging storm of some tempest sea under an assault of alien meteors. It is a tour de force of gestural abstraction set in its precious case commodified under glass in an airless self-reflective abyss. Beneath the showcase are two crude ceramic heads created in 1986 which have inscribed on their skulls some secret society's initiation symbols. The grouping of these works spells a cautious message to the viewer: Art is powerful and can change the world. 

On display until June 16th. If Pfaffman survives the responses to this latest issue of his genius, he will celebrate his 70th birthday in July. In the meantime come to Red Hook and see this marvelous exhibition.