Jerry Zeniuk | How to Paint

Jerry Zeniuk is one of the key figures in the international Fundamental Painting movement: he showed in Geplante Malerei at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 1974, and in the following year he was a protagonist in Fundamental Painting at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

 

For this special occasion, the first significant presence of Zeniuk in Italy, which also marks the start of the official representation of the artist by ABC-ARTE, we have decided to take the emblematic and incisive title of the most striking series of recent works, How to Paint. Presented in 2017 at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, accompanied by a fundamental monograph edited by Heinz Liesbrock published by Sieveking Verlag Munich, the series represents Zeniuk’s current reflection, based on colour and on its physical and mental capacity to generate spaces at a high qualitative level. From the first monochromes of the 1970s, well represented in the exhibition with extraordinary incunabula, to the current works, sequences of circles and dots that with the support variously create situations with a strong chromatic and luminous valency, Zeniuk confirms and broadens his concept of the primacy of the painterly elements in their infinite capacity to qualify vision.

 

Colour is essential to the painting of Jerry Zeniuk, and “Beauty”, philosophically and visually, is the ultimate goal in his paintings. According to Zeniuk, colours are not only the bearers of emotion, but their interaction reflects social and human relationships in general as well.

 

His more recent canvases use different coloured circles or dots or forms to create colour interactions that create a specific pictorial space. They float on a whitish coloured or raw canvas, but suggest space that is occupied by the retained light. The edges of these dots are in some cases sharp, in others vague and atmospheric, brought into a harmonious equilibrium and have a strong spatial effect.

 

The exhibition in ABC-ARTE is accompanied by a new bilingual monograph published by ABC-ARTE editions, with an essay by the curator Flaminio Gualdoni, a critical appreciation by Claudia Rajlich and a rich documentary apparatus.