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Press Release

In Secret Lives of Rainbows, Smith deploys an array of colorful media to create vibrant paintings whose complex arrangements of shapes, intricate patterns, vacillating spaces, and scintillating surfaces recall the wonders of basic school age geometry and visual trickery.  Looking back at his own life, Smith channels his initial astonishment at first encountering simple one- or two-point perspective by using diagonal bands of shapes to evoke space.  The dimensional complexity occurs when the viewer is denied vanishing points, causing the structures to simultaneously move forward and recede.  

As the color and compositional arrangement lead the vision back and forth through space, it is met with a net of decorative, obsessively drawn surfaces.  Within Smith’s intimate, fetishistic surfaces lurks a devotion to the challenges of abstract beauty and its ability to confound expectation andprovoke desire.  Every composition is treated like a game with self-imposed rules and limitations regarding color and form.  Though there is a grid present, its rigid structure and predictability operates as a foil to Smith’s often erratic and unplanned compositions.

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