Jeff Depner

Gerard Goodrow – With his geometric abstractions, Jeff Depner undertakes a formal analysis of the interrelationship between form, colour and space. A significant influence on his highly independent formal language can be found within architecture. Depner uses, for example, flat, muted colours, which conjure up associations to institutional and industrial buildings (schools, public authorities, factories or warehouse docks). Furthermore, the geometric forms and linear structures within his paintings are also frequently reminiscent of architectural elements, such as a-frames, hoarding fences or timber battens. Taking this one step further, one could even argue that his compositions are indeed “constructed”.

Yet although architecture suddenly appears to take centre stage, his expressive, clearly “hand-made” painting style with seemingly inadvertent paint drippings, scratches and traces of brush strokes make “Art” once again the focus of attention. Indeed, the Canadian painter takes part in an ongoing discourse on the essence and the possibilities of abstract painting and makes conscious reference to predecessors such as Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Stella or Richard Tuttle, who especially in the 1960s provided new impulses in the field of painterly geometric abstraction. An exhibition title from 2006 is programmatic in this context: „Regenerating the Past, Proposition for the Future“.

His „Reconfigured Grid Paintings“ can thus be understood as an investigation into how pictorial structures emerge through the interrelationship between form and colour. Depner’s paintings are in a certain sense “remixes”, since the artist appropriates motifs, forms and even ideas from the past – both from art history and from everyday life – and deconstructs these in order to reassemble them according to his own concepts, which in turn are greatly influenced by contemporary culture.

Artist Statement

My work explores compositional structure through the relationship between colors. Elements from high and low visual culture are dismantled and reconstructed. These forms are created through cause and effect, wherein each layer interacts with it’s predecessor, to create a functioning system of parts.

Constructed to pit architectonic organization against the organic, a dialogue between geometric order and cellular growth emerges to create a language in constant flux.

As a whole, these units combine to create a sort of ‘abstract sign” operating separately from speech and writing patterns, with the intention of seizing the viewer on an unconscious or automatic level.