CHRIS DOROSZ, "Staple Series and Paint Drop Series," Nov. 11 - 25, 2006, Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg

×

1 of 3

Expand

"A city through the leaves"

Chris Dorosz, "A city through the leaves," 2004, acrylic/gel medium, sparkles, staples on canvas, 48" x 72".

×

2 of 3

Expand

Jim Panou

"Drag stasis"

Chris Dorosz, "Drag stasis," 2006, acrylic paint on acrylic plastic, 12.5 x 21 x 6.5 inches.

×

3 of 3

Expand

"A city through the leaves"

Chris Dorosz, "A city through the leaves," 2004, acrylic/gel medium, sparkles, staples on canvas, 48" x 72".

Prev

Next

CHRIS DOROSZ, Staple Series and Paint Drop Series

Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg

Nov. 11 - 25, 2006

By Kristen Pauch-Nolin

Winnipeg artist Chris Dorosz’s paintings are visually enticing, offering a striking balance of delicacy and utility. Intensely detailed, intelligently designed, and skillfully crafted, they straddle artistic disciplines and genres, borrowing technical elements from sculpture, craft, and painting with concepts inspired by philosophy, religion, and contemporary culture. For his November exhibition at Mayberry gallery, Dorosz will present variations on the work he has focused on for the past six years since relocating to San Francisco where he currently teaches art and design. Several new pieces from the Staple Series and Paint Drop Series will be included, providing evidence of the origins and progression of his artistic practice. 

Dorosz views the act of painting as a fusion of conceptual, philosophical, and spiritual actions, which he relates to ontological thought and ideas of being. “Paint can be a metaphor for the physical world,” says Dorosz. “It could be atoms, mud, or paint — you become the creator.”

Since graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design more than a decade ago, Dorosz has been exploiting the materiality of his chosen medium and celebrating its natural fluidity by capturing tiny globules of acrylic paint as they fall. Contained within industrial staples (that serve as tiny reservoirs) or trapped in narrow plastic rods, the tiny droplets come together to form complex patterns and images.

The Staple Series developed out of Dorosz’s desire to find new ways of putting paint onto a support without using a brush. Inspired by piles of tiny staples discarded after canvases were removed from their stretchers, he found a unique artistic gesture by arranging the bits of metal into grids and filling them with different coloured pigments. “The staples were at first a pedestrian object,” explains Dorosz, “but now I see them as perfectly sized units that represent a modern material juxtaposed against the idea of history.”

Similarly, the Paint Drop Series is connected to the history of paint and to the idea that paintings are illusionary. Each piece is sculptural, created by assembling tiny plastic tubes filled with coloured drops of pigment into tightly supported groupings. Once amassed, the drops form recognizable images, usually of small groups or figures. Dorosz sees this work as a reflecting his view of paint. “There is something very physical about it,” he says. “At some point in every painting there was something swishing around and now its dry.” 

Dorosz’s pieces are slick and contemporary, referencing current trends in design and technological advancement. Both the Paint Drop and Staple Series connect to the age of digitalization, with direct reference to the pixilation of images. “Formally, we are in the heart of a revolution,” says Dorosz. “Particles fall apart and then come back together. Technology is relatively recent and, as I am making the work, it is changing. The idea of binaries maybe isn’t technology, maybe it’s religion, or maybe it’s the way it actually is.”

Represented by: Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto; Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg.