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Press Release

Geoffrey Todd Smith has created a group of mixed media paintings on panel.  Each work employs the letter X within its composition. As X, with its multiple cultural possibilities, is manipulated through a variety of color relationships and varying prominence within the composition, each painting is given a personality and mood of its own.  He patiently explores the impossibility of achieving a purely abstract image. Employing this limited vocabulary, he delineates a seemingly impenetrable field of optical buzz and hiss. Each work begins with a default position of gridded shapes painted and often adorned with a “horror vaccui” fizz of zigzags. This collaboration between Smith’s rhythmic mark making and seductive color arrangement reveals alternating moments of depth and flatness leaving the viewer with a dizzying trail of clues to the artist’s mindset and influences.

 

Though primarily abstract, his works draw heavily from personal visual experiences. They evoke moments from pop culture, recent art history, and activities from his life such as: video games, jigsaw puzzles, doodling, fashion, wall paper, design, sticker collections, board games, soccer balls, nature documentaries and anything that he has found visually stimulating. These varied moments are absorbed into memories and are reinvented as abstract visual hybrids. 

The titles given to each work provide insight into his thought process but rarely reveal the entire story. They are intended to capture a certain rhythm, cadence or mood. As the title is read and the image examined the patient viewer is rewarded with a personal experience that may evolve with each subsequent visit.

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