Wave (Primary Title)
Heide Trepanier, American, born 1969 (Artist)
"[I take] the paint, the material, with all of its faults and messes, and [use] it to create odd, sad, and sometimes violent narrative. This links the “failure” of the paint to do what we are used to, or what we may want (clean, orderly and representational) to our failure to create order and control." —Heide Trepanier
Trepanier’s work combines the automatic painting techniques of Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism with the visual crispness and thematic violence of contemporary cartooning. She makes her works by tossing enamel paint onto a horizontal panel precoated with a solid color. She then applies black paint marker to the edges of forms, giving them a sense of mass, volume, and speed. This simple addition transformsthe shapes into active agents that take part in charged interactions. In Wave various shades of blue, gray, and white curl around each other and around a central blob of light blue that appears to be vomiting. In a wry twist, Trepanier’s otherwise innocuous title begins to suggest a wave of nausea, triggered perhaps by the rolling motion of the paint itself.
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