The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art believes in the power of the art of our time. Through programming, advocacy, and collaboration, we work with artists and communities to build a better world.

Jonathan Frioux: Polarities

Feb 13, 2015 – Mar 7, 2015

Threading colors together across a coordinate system, Jonathan Frioux’s Polarities reaches back to the past to find forms for the present.

He experiments with the grid—a pictorial theme commonly found in modern art – in order to allude to systems of sequence and order. However, through Frioux’s gestures of pushing, pulling, shifting, and distorting the grid, pairs of foils begin to highlight new ways of seeing.

Polarities
Depth-flatness
Interior-exterior
Structure-void
Control-chaos
Freedom-restraint
“The simple forms hearken back to the ocean,” explain Frioux. “The grid billows and shrinks, becoming broken nets or open windows.  The unexposed dark layers seep through the bright stripes, illuminating perimeters and resulting in anticipation and wonder. Just as the lines are constantly pushed and pulled, the viewer is dragged through the undertow and rolled towards far-reaching horizons.”