Pleasure Realm 2012

Darren Waterston's painting, Pleasure Realm, is awash with stains and drips in a limited palette of pinks, browns, and grays. It's hard not to imagine the act of painting it, the artist hovering over the canvas, allowing pools of color to blend and bleed into each other, an act of pouring and waiting, shifting and intuiting. I sympathize with Waterston, imagining what it must have been like to coax this ethereal landscape into being. The paint is thin, almost like watercolor, giving the surface a translucent quality that invites you to peer into its depths. Look at how the vertical gestures, like stalagmites in a cave, feel both organic and otherworldly, their drippy forms evoking a sense of slow, geological time. The marks communicate a feeling, a mood, a sense of longing for something just beyond our grasp. Waterston is in conversation with other painters, a lineage of artists exploring the possibilities of abstraction and the poetics of the material world. Like all of us, he embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, inviting us to bring our own interpretations to the canvas, making the pleasure realm uniquely ours.