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March, 24th - April, 30th 2004 |
In March 2001, the Albert Benamou gallery presented an exhibition of young American artists, shown for the first time in Paris: "New York Realists Now." This group of painters all had astonishing technique and situated themselves within the grand tradition of classic, academic painting. All of them had received, at the New York Academy of Art or The Art Student's League, an apprenticeship worthy of the nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts Academy.
On March 24, 2004, the gallery is presenting paintings by Willliam Kennon (born in 1957) part of that surprising group. Kennon reveals both skill and sensitivity in the urban landscapes that are the focus of this exhibition.
Kennon's work might be associated with that of the traditional North American landscapes artists who founded the Hudson River School in 1820 - painters such as Kensett, Bierstadt, and Church, themselves inspired by the Italian classicists. But Willliam Kennon discards the romantic emphasis that typifies the past century, that Impressionist vibration. Instead, he searches for the poetry in ordinary places from which (in his studio) he creates a Luminist vision of the universe.
Kennon's favorite themes are views of churches in the icy cold dawn against a golden sky, the urban landscapes of Jersey City and Mill Creek, enhanced by a glittering snowfall of the enveloping mystery of night. In his paintings, a meticulous examination of subject (utilizing photographic references) is distilled into melancholic poetry.
Human presence is entirely excluded from his pictorial universe, never perturbing his architectural scenes. His relationship to the environment is intimate and silent, undisturbed by noise or turmoil, and at times nearly religious, metaphysical.
This quasi-Friedrichesque sense of contemplation, almost certainly due to his German origins imparts to his work a cold and spectral emotion, a feeling subdued by the glorious luminosity he produces with brio. Immobile, serene, his cities sleep; and if, in his work, some light hits a parking lot or the side of a building the world remains nonetheless secretive and hushed. Time stands still; modernity is revealed only in the vestiges of a construction site, an empty parking lot, a crane by the harbour: contemporary temples of solitude and abandonment.
Transcending his immediate environment, Kennon creates a world in which ghosts inhabit water tanks or electric posts set against the clear, cold, expansive skies of New York and New Jersey. He constructs these compositions in idealized perspectives that imbue his architectural sites with heroic dignity. Using photographs made on site, he recomposes visual material in his studio.
If Kennon's art distances itself from the conceptual and formalistic preoccupations of avant-garde New York art, he ignores artistics fashion. Rather, using his painstaking painting techniques, he becomes a virtuoso observer, asking real questions about solitude, the place of man in nature, and silence. On the side of a Mobil oil tank, this otherworldly painter, with a kind of heathen audacity, reproduces the enigmatic phrase: "How can we help you?"
View available works by William Kennon
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