Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Love Streams, Xylor Jane's first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents a series of new paintings that join the precision of conceptual values such as progression, method and the use of the grid, while focusing on numbers as recognizable visual forms of universal, empathic value. Jane’s process avoids rigor as an end in itself to pursue the “balance between effort and effect” that Josef Albers sought for. The visual impact of her paintings is not only achieved by their meticulous manufacture but by the use of the subtle movement that color and paint create on the surface of the canvas, engaging the viewer in a micro-contemplation.
Jane’s counting systems are often autobiographical, measuring different periods of her life or using her birthday as a starting point. Solstice Baby is one of her 12/21 paintings, the date of her birthday and a palindrome, the sequence that defined her love for numbers. This version also references wall painting #880 Loopy Doopy by Sol Lewit, 9/1998. Days Alive #5 accounts for the number of days Jane has lived in prime numbers, traced in thick dots of paint reaching a silver to gold gradation.
Hard-edge polygons, especially triangles and squares, are shapes that create unique vibrating patterns. Although their use joins histories of op-art, these works go beyond the purely visual to invite the viewer to read between the lines of their randomness. Love streams follows an eleven-digit prime palindrome arranged in four columns from lowest to highest, with fields that flash between positive and negative subsets, while 5th spell for POTUS, is composed of right-angle ripples that alternate between black and metallic rainbow hues in an on-off circuit. The painting casted a spell to end the reign of 45 and begin a new administration -which has worked- by the use of the number 46.
Diagonal grids allow Jane to explore more effects like torsional, spiral or woven shapes. Rebirther 2 is a counting spiral on a diagonal grid. The clockwise counting begins in a chosen center with one black dot, and spirals with 2 dots, then 3 dots, resulting in a dancing motion of scalloping shapes. Ridgerunner is a line test oriented on the diagonal that is applied to a very blue ground based on a photograph of a sky taken on David Horvitz in 2008. The painted lines start with green as a square centered on a rectangle and are woven with rainbow colors in alternating symmetry.
In Jane’s work numbers avoid their controlling connotation to be regarded in their multiple dimensions: as values, motifs, signs or emotions. The paintings in Love Streams continue her intuitive mathematics, presenting patterns that elude a definite understanding, drifting in and out of legibility.
