MICHAEL ROUILLARD
Press Release
Pablo’s Birthday is pleased to announce Seen/Unseen…, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and scrolls by Michael Rouillard. This is Rouillard’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
In concert with his paintings, Rouillard’s drawings, scrolls and tape pieces share a critical part of his studio practice and provide a greater look into the artist’s processes and meditations. The exhibition offers an overview of Rouillard’s discipline over the last decade - including single and multi-panel oil on aluminum paintings, ballpoint pen pieces on paper and tape, as well as preliminary drawings for the paintings. The recent body of work continues Rouillard’s interest in the framing of light.
Regarding the paintings and scribble pieces, the artist has written: —I am interested in working with subtle distinctions of perception closely related to the architecture of a space. The compositions are made of intersecting lines and bands with the joints between panels becoming an element in the composition - another way of making a line. Although on aluminum they are perceived as being physically very light, almost as if on paper. Their clarity is not unlike print on a page or musical notation where a strong contrast between black and white makes possible the thinnest of lines.
—The ink pieces started in 1993 with the simple act of scribbling with a ball-point pen in a 14 x 11" sketch pad (soon after, 4 pens in each hand were used). In order to treat the entire surface evenly the pad was rotated every so often then flipped to do the same thing to the reverse. They are worked on until darkened to a dense satin black (until line melds into plane). The process is initially hidden - seen but unseen.
Since 2010, Rouillard has been involved with the creation of a subtle tension between the slightly elongated square of the overall piece and the stronger horizontal elements in the composition. Although grid-based, he works intuitively with proportion, dimensions and composition.
He began the multi-panel pieces in 2016 with several triptychs and in the past 2 years has done 9, 12 and 18 panel pieces - one of which will be included in the present exhibition. His initial focus of working within the confines of a given rectangle has developed into a horizontal expansiveness.
Rouillard lives and works in New York.