Chris Trueman: Beneath the Skin

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is pleased to announce Chris Trueman: Beneath the Skin, a solo exhibition featuring new works by the Southern California based painter. In his debut project with ECAA, Trueman explores the coexistence of several competing traditions of abstract painting, and presents a cohesive vocabulary that draws from the tensions of its collisions. This most recent body of work presents a unique amalgam of various genres as the artist references the precision of hard edge painting, the expansiveness of color field and the gestural nuance of abstract expressionism. The resulting works are both expansive and immersive, inviting the viewer to experience the simultaneity of depth and recession, spontaneity and strategy.

Chris Trueman’s command of the painted surface is immediately apparent in the formal quality of his work. While his paintings are beautifully rich, the seduction of their surfaces belie the complexity of their content. The works suggest a simultaneous questioning of the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, OP Art, and Color-Field painting. The unexpected intersection of these often ideologically isolationist art practices sets up contradictory visual constructs in Trueman’s work, and by extension, a philosophical set of contradictions as well. The spontaneity of gesture is set against the fastidious technique of hard edge, while expansive areas of color are offset by architectonic layers and terse geometries. The primacy of any singular art movement’s presets is denied by the poignant presence of its counterpart, spun through the artist’s intentionally ambivalent re-combinations.

Trueman’s practice re-envisions these inherited histories of painting by deconstructing their latent imperatives with a fresh aesthetic and approach to materials. The works seductively create a convergence of abstract styles; hard and soft edges collide, gestures emerge from the expanses of color and layers bounce to the forefront, while others recede. The artist’s choice of acrylic medium and acrylic spray paint further contemporizes his re-appropriation of these histories. Through the strategic and intuitive composition of geometric planes, saturated color fields and gestural introjections, Trueman’s paintings feel like new vistas opening onto old terrains.

Chris Trueman graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003, with a double major BFA degree in Painting and Digital Media, and earned an MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. The artist has exhibited his work in numerous exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and internationally in Milan, Italy. Recently the Lancaster Museum of Art and History presented a solo exhibition of his paintings entitled Slipstream. Trueman was also included in the group exhibitions: To Live and Paint in LA and The Subterraneans at the Torrance Art Museum. In 2013 his work was exhibited at various art fairs including: Dallas Art Fair, Pulse New York, Art Aspen, Houston Fine Art Fair, Pulse Miami and Art San Diego. While at CGU he was the recipient of several awards including the Ann Peppers Foundation Fellowship and a Claremont Graduate University Merit Fellowship. Trueman’s work was included in New American Paintings MFA Edition (#87) and the New American Paintings Pacific Coast Issue (#103), released in December 2012.

Special Exhibition Events:
Chris Trueman Artist Talk
Saturday April 12 at 5pm
Please join us in conversation with the artist and exhibition curator Carl Berg, Saturday April 12 at 5pm in the gallery.