Ted Kincaid
Monday’s Romance is Tuesday’s Sad Affair

Talley Dunn Gallery
August 29 – October 24, 2015

With his new series of tondo thunderhead clouds and waterfall imagery, Kincaid reconsiders depictions of landscape and its conventions by digitally dissecting and selectively reassembling the work of painters Giovanni Bellini, Hans Memling, and Frederic Edwin Church. By layering vibrantly colored, solvent-based inks on canvas the artist is able to convey a graceful shifting of tones from dark to light and transition from surface to depth.

In works such as Tondo Thunderhead 723 (Bellini 2), Kincaid captures the subdued palette of Venetian Renaissance painter Giovanni Bellini with a sampling of the simple countryside depicted in Bellini’s Christ Blessing. Kincaid moves the landscape of the original source from background to center stage with an interest in creating a sense of the imaginary with his vibrantly colored cloud formations. The artist’s skillful combination of crisp and blurred lines in Variation on a Waterfall by Church at times borders on post-painterly abstraction, and Kincaid’s beautiful imagery subtly deconstructs conventional definitions of landscape. Kincaid distorts and blurs his forms to break down any narrative possibility and to emphasize the tension between artifice and reality.

Kincaid began his career in the early 1990s, and since that time, his artwork has been featured in more than one hundred exhibitions. The tension between representation and abstraction, and the organic and the geometric, have been ongoing themes in Kincaid’s photographs and prints. By imposing a formal structure over the unruliness of nature, Kincaid’s work forces a rereading of landscape while delighting the eye with luminous and dazzling fields of color and pattern. With this new series, Kincaid’s digital painting hybrids also show the influence of contemporary composer Max Richter with his interest in pulling apart and re-assembling key elements to create innovative pieces that speak both of contemporary and historical contexts.