Points of Origin
A virtual viewing room surveying Westfall's geometric evolution through small-scale works
Stephen Westfall
Points of Origin
Stephen Westfall
Demimonde, 2014, oil and alkyd on canvas, 30 x 30 inches
I want the paintings to enter a room rather than propose an opening away. The small paintings function this way as much as the big ones. Any "other" space, illusion, is a function of even color acting as its own illumination.
Stephen Westfall, 2023
Moon Flower, 1997, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
Over the past 15 years, Stephen Westfall has become known for his large-scale wall paintings and public art installations, from college campuses to MTA subway stations. He has tested the limits of his geometric compositions, and found their possibilities to be joyously adaptable and seemingly limitless. Whether it be exploring the grid, turning it on its side to become diamonds and harlequin patterns, or pushing it into off-kilter, skewed and asymmetrical territories, he has proven that where edges meet and color sings in harmony, the combinations are as yet inexhaustible. After arriving at such monumental scales, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine his small-scale works, the point of origin of all these explorations. This viewing room is a sampling of his evolution from the exquisitely minimalist grids of the late 90s, to implied and abstracted landscapes, cosmatesque patterns, harlequin structures and beyond, all while holding true to his signature jewel-toned palette that seems to be lit from within.
- MS
For a long time I've thought of my paintings as pictures in the way that Cubist paintings are pictures, but as pictures of paintings that were somehow reinvested with the singular objecthood of the stretched canvas and whose surfaces emanated the deep flat colors of icon painting.
Stephen Westfall, 2023
Thunder Basin, 2002, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Vale, 2020, oil and alkyd on canvas, 28 x 21 inches
Certainly he is aiming in these recent paintings for something found in icons that might be called presence, or perhaps an absence that implies presence. Their refusal to resolve allows them to conjure a beyond that refuses definition, even as they look at first glance like the most secure of entities. The haptic stimulus of their chroma and the kinetic dynamism of their compositions ensure their physicality even as they rely on sheer opticality for their effect.
Faye Hirsch, 2021
It seems to me that by deploying his geometric forms to twist the picture plane, and by refusing to establish a repeating pattern of colors and shapes, as he does in a number of the paintings, Westfall has reconfigured possibilities associated with Op Art, Pattern and Decoration, and 1960s geometric abstraction, taking the unitary organization inherent to these styles into a fresh territory. In Westfall’s paintings, the parts begin to gain parity with the whole.
John Yau, 2018
Treasure, 2019, oil and alkyd on canvas, 31 x 31 inches
