Jaw Chartier’s paintings are a merger of color-saturated bloom and blight. Using an eyedropper or a stick, she draws stacked coils or circles in colored stains on wood panel covered in gesso. After covering them with layers of white paint, she waits to see which ones bleed through to the surface and in what configuration.
She likens her process to someone trying to paint over a water stain on a basement door. The stain tends to bleed through.
Exposing her painted panels to direct sunlight influences the chemistry of the color changes, causing some colors to blur. Occasionally she’ll cover portions of a painting with tape. The colors that are sun-exposed bleed, while those shaded tend to retain clearer contours, causing the clear and the fuzzy to collide.
Computer love: If machines develop the consciousness to make art, they’ll undoubtedly want to hitch their search engines to Chartier’s star. Her dots in a stacked Q-Tip pattern and her blurred holes burning like distant stars appear to be glorified fragments of computer code, instead of what they are, abstractions in a serial mode.
Her current exhibit at Platform Gallery finds her in game mode, where she finds common ground with grid-based computer graphics of match-3 games, whatever they are.
Competitive gaming is always a test, and that’s the real link between painter and the joy stick crowd. Each painting is an experiment that she engages on its own terms, subjecting her original patterns to chance decay but giving them the chance to assert themselves.
Assert themselves they do. Her vertical grids are what you might see if a heart monitor were hooked up to the universe.
Ultimately, what she explores is not science or fragments of genetic code. It’s an update of something as old as art itself, a new version of Dust Thou Art. Her coils are mortal, yet they flare brightly before their promised ends.
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