Untitled Plurality (Red) 2009
Quirky, pixilated paintings by Daniel Aksten are the highlight of the new downtown gallery, CB1Gallery’s inaugural show, “Difference and Repetition.â€Â Uniform metal panels explore a restrained palette (red, grey, yellow…) with taped grids and squares with rounded corners. Featuring both what the artist refers to as “portraits†and “landscapes,†each work is a result of calculated construction and arbitrary randomness determined, literally, by a roll of dice. Interestingly, the carefully masked and unmasked marks of automotive paint, refer not so much to the future as it might have in the past, as much as to the now almost antiquated computer byte. Even the subtle basket-weaving texture of the paint layers points to craft and the artist’s hand, in a way that makes one think about how the word “modern†has come to seem “old-fashioned†(CB1Gallery, Downtown).
Untitled Composite (RYB), 2010