Darren Waterston: Architectonic Forms

Architectonic Forms is New York-based artist Darren Waterston’s ninth solo exhibition with Haines Gallery, and follows his nationally touring installation Filthy Lucre, a reimagining of James McNeil Whistler’s eccentric masterwork of decorative art, the Peacock Room. Exhibited for the first time on the West Coast, Waterston’s newest body of work continues to explore the coalescence between painting and architecture in Western art history, while reflecting the artist’s sustained interest in the allegorical, alchemical and apocalyptic.

In Architectonic Forms, Waterston draws directly from devotional architectural structures such as Renaissance altarpieces, confessional screens and Gothic partitions, reinterpreting them as magnetic and even menacing painterly objects. Familiar religious iconography is transformed into apocalyptic landscapes, gestural flourishes and paint-scarred surfaces characteristic of Waterston’s work. The centerpiece of the exhibition, Triptych (twilight), 2014, is based on Matthias Grünewald’s sixteenth century masterpiece, The Isenheim Altar, and casts a spectral halo from the back of its hinged panels. At once intriguing and foreboding, the works hint at something darker lurking beneath their surfaces and demonstrate paradoxical ideas of attraction and revulsion. Says Waterston, “Esthetic collisions of beauty and the grotesque are continuously found in my work. This is what ecstasy is, transcendence through rhapsody and terror.”