Fitzhugh Karol & Evan Bellantone: Drawn Lots

About

 Bellantone’s monoprints explore the image of woodgrain as both an abstract form and a depiction of nature itself. His individual graphic shapes echo this dual meaning in each print, hovering between the recognizable and inscrutable, yet taking on literal meaning. The repeated matrix of the same oak plank is reimagined and reinterpreted over and over to investigate the connection between a consciousness of abstraction, symbolism and the natural world.

Karol’s sculptures reflect a similar interest in nature and its inherent symbolism. Referring to his vocabulary of forms as “mountains”, “stairs”, and “saddles”, Karol summons a human relationship to landscape and the built environment, placing his sculptures in lived experience and obscuring this iconography through combination and subtraction.

Core to both artist’s practice is a nuanced approach to drawing, with its focus on line over color, modeling, and form.The monoprints in this exhibition were created from a single piece of oak, generating a series that Bellantone describes as drawings. In turn, Karol’s wire sculptures operate like drawing in three dimensions that stretch and reach to force perspective or imply different figurations and approaches. Bellantone’s and Karol’s works occupy a space of visual rhyme, repeating and recombining their choice elements without the pretense of conclusion. For both artists, these themes are ongoing and open to radical revision.