Richard Serra, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Kate Petley, Derrick Velasquez

Richard Serra, Don Voisine, Stephen Westfall, Kate Petley, Derrick Velasquez

Robischon Gallery

1740 Wazee Street, Denver, Colorado 80202 

November 21, 2019-January 18, 2020

Admission: Free

Review by Samantha Hunt-Durán

Robischon Gallery is currently showing simultaneous solo exhibitions from five different artists—three of which are New York-based and two of which are local. The artists are loosely lassoed together under the vague commonality of “varying aspects of abstraction,”[1] with each gallery feeling very much like its own exhibition rather than a part contributing to the whole.

An installation view of three of eight Paintstik and silica on handmade paper works by Richard Serra in a series titled Equal at Robischon Gallery. Image by Samantha Hunt-Durán.

The gallery star is Richard Serra, whose smallish pieces are—not surprisingly, and dare-I-say predictably—awarded most of the gallery’s real estate. This series of works on paper shares its name with his sculpture Equal—a collection of eight steel, black boxes at the MoMA. Outside of their context with this sculpture, these works are noteworthy for little more than their texture, and their “preeminent,” “significant,” “widely celebrated” maker.[2]

Don Voisine, Overboard, oil on panel, 18 x 18 inches, Image courtesy of Robischon Gallery.

Off to the right, the Serra showcase gives way to Don Voisine’s panel paintings, which deal with far more interesting visual concepts of illusion, depth (and lack thereof), movement, and stillness. These concepts are achieved by tensions of line quality, matte and gloss surface juxtapositions, and subtle mastery of color. Pure, vibrant hues are made all the more so with very thin, barely perceptible lines of unsaturated values of the same hue.

An installation view of Stephen Westfall’s oil and alkyd on canvas paintings at Robischon Gallery. Image by Samantha Hunt-Durán.

In the gallery beyond the Voisine rooms, Stephen Westfall’s larger geometric canvases are surprisingly allotted the smaller space in the back. This space vibrates with the sheer surface area of bold, geometric chroma. The close placement of these intensely colorful, starkly composed paintings is dizzying. The viewer is not provided enough space to settle in front of one piece without the other vivid pieces in the room calling for attention.

The two-person local artist exhibition is tucked away into the smallest nook of the gallery off of the large, central “Serra space.” Staples of the Denver art scene, Kate Petley (also from New York) and Derrick Velasquez (the only non-New Yorker) are only afforded two and three pieces, respectively.

Kate Petley, Almost Falling, archival print and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 76 inches. Image courtesy of Robischon Gallery.

Petleys’s radiant canvases achieve a push-and-pull of depth through overlapping forms in varying degrees of translucency. The canvases evoke the sense of both a digital screen and a collage. Due to the experiential sense of space and depth achieved through variations in color quality, Petley’s work might be better placed across the gallery in dialogue with Voisine’s.

A detail of Derrick Velasquez’s Untitled 174, vinyl and maple, 72 x 58 x 1.5 inches. Image by Samantha Hunt-Durán.

Velasquez creates his three vinyl wall sculptures with countless strips of black and white vinyl stacked atop one another, their shape influenced by a wood rod and the effect of gravity. The gradually graded edges of the sculptures resemble the pages of an open book, and the alternating black and white lines produce an energetic, op art effect—re-imagining the bounds of the vinyl material.

Robischon, as always, brings a high caliber of artist to Denver. Nevertheless, the general theme of “abstraction” seems like a clumsy, easy way of drawing a line through five very distinct artists with unique aims and intentions. These five artists do, indeed, “add to the vocabulary of abstraction with their distinctive pursuits,”[3] but only in the sense that this statement is so vague that nearly any five artists considered together would fit this declaration. 

Samantha Hunt-Durán is a Denver native, born and raised. She holds a MA in Art History, a BFA in Pre-Art Conservation from the University of Denver, and currently serves as a board member of the Commerce City Cultural Council. Her research interests include materiality, alter-modernism, embodiment, and object-oriented ontologies. 

[1] According to Robischon’s exhibition notes: https://www.robischongallery.com/exhibition/318/press_release/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.