Ejay Weiss - Emergence

About

“Ejay Weiss - Emergence” debuts a selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures made between 1966 and 2018.  Over five decades, Weiss developed several different series that focused on the movement of color through space and time. As one who was fascinated with the 4th Dimension, Weiss’s paintings constantly sought to reflect juxtaposing perspectives simultaneously while also suggesting movement of the object through time. Weiss’s paintings are both his inner impression and outer expression of space and time from someone who knew we have limited amounts of both.

Weiss’s early watercolors, made between 1966 and 1970, utilize fields of color and transparent texture that are set within traditional painted margins meant to serve as quick views into vivid, bucolic landscapes. Very much a part of the world in which he lived, his work conveys an exciting combination wonder and influence.  By the late 1980s Ejay Weiss embarked on the Eden Series (1989-1992) Here, the landscape appears pushed to the margins.  The depth of the transparent watercolors has been replaced by intense surface textures that suggest different terrains of plants, trees, water and foliage. 

Like images from outer space, Weiss’s aesthetic exploration of nature and physics takes us somewhere entirely unique and yet somehow familiar.  All of these details are ultimately flattened out but remain connected together, at the center, by a solitary blue square. From paintings such as “Adam & Eve” (1989), “Constellation” (1989), “The Descent” (1991) and “Return to Paradise” (1992), Weiss takes the viewer through years of deep meditation that turns Eden, as the world, inside out.

As Weiss approached the last years of the 20th-Century, he began to explore the use and flow of color as a visual language for chaos and complexity. The Runnel Series began in 

1996 as a group of studies that sought to reconcile the built-up three-dimensional surface, previously seen throughout the Eden paintings, into something more layered and flat. Across this series, Weiss set colors on an independent course, leading to the culmination of lines and intricate networks. By adding depth and dimension to an initial background painting, the runnel works stand as a critique upon the basis of form, by reducing all content down to a series of ongoing interrelationships of two points, or more. Entropy (2001-2002) followed and which incorporated the representation of objects - such as fruit and flowers - beneath the artist’s transparent weave-and-weft of colors.

Ejay Weiss’s most renowned work of art titled 9/11 Elegy (2001-2012) was inspired by the events of September 11th, 2001 to which he bore witness. ​He was so affected by ​the tragedy, his most monumental work was born of his catharsis and comprised 9, immense panels. This profound visual expression was ​first exhibited in ​9/11 ELEGIES: 2001-2011​ at the Narthex Gallery of Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church ​in​ the Citicorp Plaza in Manhattan. Soon after, this series of 9 panels was partially exhibited in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition Rendering The Unthinkable (2016-2018) and then acquired in-full by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

The events of September 11th, 2001 continued to resonate with Weiss. His paintings became inextricably connected to time and its essence, which he made prominent within the Evolution of Stones (2004-2005) and Emergence (2006-2007). Here, the artist’s vibrant, circular lines extend randomly through a prismatic range of colors. Ejay Weiss fused his deep critique of fossilized land and atmospheric weightlessness into Seascapes (2008-2011), a 13-panel painting portraying the crest of ocean waves along a shell-filled shoreline. Viewers are dwarfed by elements of the sea, painted larger than life while calling attention to significant issues that relate to water, air and land.

Ejay Weiss died on June 9th, 2018. From 1960 to 1963 Weiss studied Architecture and Painting with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at Pratt Institute. From 1963 to 1965 he studied painting at New York University. One of Weiss’ techniques combines visual elements of natural landscapes within a rotational restructuring of the picture plane, suggesting an entirely different way of experiencing the 2nd dimension. By creating a geologic-like matrix of paint that draws upon quantum physics and scientific logic, Weiss portrayed an array of life forms that spin to and from the viewer, adding a paradoxical sense of timelessness to the illusion of physical depth.