"Throughout his variegated career and across a broad range of media — including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and various hybrids — Don Suggs has frequently tinkered with the sacred geometry of the modernist picture plane, subjecting it to unholy alliances with classically mimetic picture-making, usually in the form of pictorial landscapes. Recently his geometric fixations, in this capacity and otherwise, have narrowed to the ideal form of circles composed from infinitely variable bands of concentric color; an iconic visual trope throughout art history, but one of particular centrality to a wide range of modernist strategies, from Kandinsky, Duchamp, and Hilma af Klint to Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, and Kenneth Noland. Though these affinities inform Suggs’s work, his principal interest is the structure and dynamic of translation from illusionistic to abstract modes of representation.
The works from his Patrimony/Matrimony series, begun in 2006, derive their rings of color — meticulously applied onto round canvases up to nine feet in diameter using a purpose-designed turntable “easel” — from the palettes of great paintings from across the history of art. It’s something like a spectrographic readout, or core sample. Several other series applied the same formula to archetypal Western American landscapes, either in pure tondo form or as abstract insertions into black and white photographic depictions of the original source location. It’s at this point his most recent exhibit picks up..."
Read the rest of Don Suggs: Abyss Pools and Travertine Springs in ArtVoices
See the show online at LA Louver
Images: Omphalos; Tioga Pass (both 2012 archival inkjet prints)
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