Jordan Gaunce

My work employs simple, formal strategies to engage the viewer in an open-ended narrative. I have always been interested in Op Art and hard edge abstraction, but not as purely surface or Modernist expression, instead as a vehicle to viewer experience. My abstract paintings use complementary, interference, and tridactic color, along with a range of geometric and striped compositions in order to stimulate memory and emotion.

I am interested in eliciting a wide range of response through the most basic formal elements. I use line and color to evoke experience-secular and religious, memories of times and events past-and to suggest places and physical states-from specific landscapes to atmospheric phenomena. Though my titles sometimes lead one in a particular direction-The Weather is Always Nice this Time of Year and Candlelight at Mid-Morning-I seek to create an unrestricted space which can mean different things at different times to different people.

In addition to subject and content, I am also concerned with the pure pleasure of illusion and composition-and the seemingly endless possibilities that simple repetition of lines can provide. In my work, color and line create images that appear to shift and evolve in concert with the viewer's movement. With translucent and metallic pigments, as well as smooth gradient color transitions, these static works engage the viewer with a sense of motion and luminance, and an ever changing and evolving surface.

Jordan Gaunce

2009