JAMES KENNEDY: SPATIAL ALCHEMY
James Kennedy is a visual maestro. He composes sophisticated orchestrations of scintillating hues, lines, and shapes that lay claim to the epitome of virtuosic geometric abstraction for the 21st century. His works are magisterial totems to the power of intuition and imagination combined with technical excellence in the making of great art.
Kennedy’s approach creates strikingly unique paintings that seem, in some of his works, reminiscent of highly-sophisticated architectural designs, and in others, hyper-complex futuristic system schematics. The extraordinary technical precision of composition in all of these works, and the fluid interactions between color and geometry throughout them, combine to create an animated sense of internal energy that is palpable and seductive.
Studying these paintings can be at once an intellectual delight and a dizzying escapade as one realizes the innumerable connections, symmetries, parts, pieces, intersections, and exactitudes of all kinds and configurations. So finely perfect and integrally contingent does the assembly of elements appear to be that the viewer is apt to have an epiphanous realization that were any one to be destabilized, the entire composition would instantly explode into oblivion.
In the paintings in this exhibition, Kennedy works with acrylic polymer on incised panels of eucalyptus Masonite. In the spirit of an alchemist, he carefully concocts his colors and hues, mixing them with a fastidious eye for color balance to evoke specific emotional responses and never using pigments directly from a tube. Glaze
media, white and black gessoes are often employed to create meticulous underlayers into which the artist, with delicate precision, scrapes and scores his surfaces. The underpainting is a means to reveal depth and cutting through multiple layers of media allows light to emerge from within. The results are complex compositions of mathematical precision with a fluid sense of intuitiveness.
The compositions possess a harmonic nature. It is as though their internal energy vibrates in accordance with a cosmic tuning fork. It confers a musicality to the works, a feeling of rhapsody in some, waltz in others, rondo in still others. As the eye and mind survey the intricacies and colors of Kennedy’s constructions, there is an aural sensation that can be lyrical or aleatoric, depending on the piece; one painting might suggest a Bach concerto, another an atonal piece by John Cage. Clearly, vibratory feelings of rhythm, sound, and beauty are available from contemplation of these works.
The foregoing characteristics of his painting are perhaps unsurprising in light of his educational background that includes, in addition to fine arts, architecture, design, dance, choreography, music and acting. Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, Kennedy was educated throughout the UK, receiving two BA degrees – one from Royal Scottish Academy in Fine Arts, and the other from Rhodec Academy of Design in Interior and Architectural Design – and an MA degree from the London School of Contemporary Dance. In 2003, Kennedy moved to New York, and subsequently began his painterly explorations of color, tonal and spatial relationships, lines, gestures and marks – the subject he has referred to as “Obdurate components held within a complex, non-specific, painting language.”
JAMES KENNEDY: SPATIAL ALCHEMY
Kennedy’s paintings are both within and beyond the canon of geometric abstract modernism. If modernism is thought to be art in which the traditions of the past have been largely discarded in favor of experimental techniques and practices then Kennedy joins the band. This lineage of geometry in abstraction is a long and distinguished one. As a part of the history of modernism, artists exploring the use of geometrical forms to compose pictorial expression evolved out of Cubism in the early 20th century from the work of Braque and Picasso who pioneered the idea of deconstructing and reassembling the components of subject matter.
From this beginning, Piet Mondrian, along with other members of the De Stijl group in Holland, was in search of the spiritual “universal beauty” in art. Mondrian chose to limit his palette to the use of the three primary colors and the three primary values (red, blue, and yellow, and black, white and gray), and the linearity of his work to the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). Thus, in pursuit of such perfectionistic aesthetic ideals, and using simple grid and color principles, geometric abstraction was born in the second decade of the 20th century in Northern Europe. Mondrian wrote that “I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty … I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that … I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines … led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented, if necessary, by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.”
Geometric abstraction has subsequently had many practitioners and many forms,
ranging from Constructivists to Supremacists to Futurists to Minimalists, with well-known names such as Malevich, Kandinsky, Noland, and Albers, to name just a few. But the common element has been the use of geometric shapes to free art of any remnants of visual reality. Although James Kennedy’s work is rooted in these traditions, it rises into its own realm. His inspirations are freed of any strict allegiance to philosophical dogma and are concerned with involving his viewer with experiencing the pictorial space of his work, as he puts it, “in an entirely new way, engaging both the mind and the eye.” Importantly, Kennedy draws from his background in dance and choreography as well as a highly experienced visual artist. Kennedy’s experience in architecture and understanding of architectural theory and design is also quite apparent. The process of what he calls “solving spatial equations” is enabled by that experience and facilitates his integration of color and form to function in intricate harmony in these works. Kennedy’s remarkable mastery of mathematical precision and clean lines apparent in them might be thought of as reminiscent of aspects of ‘constructive art’ made in the 1930s by the legendary British artist Ben Nicholson, whose work Kennedy admires, or the elegant lines of the sculpture by the Russian artist Naum Gabo.
The intricacies of Kennedy’s surfaces are a contemporary art connoisseur’s delight. One learns that the capacity to appreciate art fully grows as one has lived life more. The ability to discern the differences between the good and the bad sharpens. The capacity to recognize contrasts emerges and, with it, an appreciation for the subtleties, details and nuances that comprise what is thought of as greatness in aesthetics, whether it be in painting, music, or architecture or other areas of the arts. This is one of the greatest joys of art appreciation and in it lies even the possibility of
JAMES KENNEDY: SPATIAL ALCHEMY
seeing in the beauty of a great work of art the traceries of the spiritual.
Kennedy’s complex paintings provide a highly concentrated visual imagery of exquisite tonal subtleties, compositional and technical precision, alchemical transformations of color and light, combining to offer the possibility for this sort of empyrean aesthetic experience.
Cipher, 2024
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel, 60 x 60 in
24 x 36 in
Notation 12, 2019
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
Isolated Incident, 2020
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
72 x 72 in
Sequence, 2024
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
36 x 48 in
30 x 120 in
Astrometry, 2022
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
Microsystem, 2017
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
9.75 x 11.75 in
Traverso, 2024
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
48 x 36 in
48 x 48 in
Fenestra, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
Salon Composition, 2024
Acrylic Polymer on Incised Eucalyptus Masonite Panel
11.75 x 24.75 in
James Kennedy
EDUCATION
BA Fine Art, Royal Scottish Academy
BA Interior + Architectural Design, Rhodec Academy of Design
POST-GRAD Diploma in Dance + Choreography, London
School of Contemporary Dance
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2024 Crystalline Velocity, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2023 Reverences and Riffs, Callan Contemporary, New Orleans, LA
2021 Isolated Incidents, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2020 Notations, Callan Contemporary, New Orleans, LA
syn.tac.tic, CALLAN Contemporary, New Orleans, LA
2019 Intaglio in Colour, Glasgow Print Studio, Glasgow, Scotland
2016 Shape - Shifting, John Hartell Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
2017 t h o u g h t f o r m s, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2015 C O N T I N U U M, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Made In Paint, Golden Foundation for the Arts
sub structures, CALLAN Contemporary, New Orleans, LA
2014 Morphosis, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL
2013 Systems, CALLAN Contemporary, New Orleans, LA
A Fine Line, Flinn Gallery, Greenwich CT
International Painting II, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, NYC
Spatial Variations, 1stdibs 200 Lex, NYC
Material Matters, Southampton Cultural Center, NY
Retro Fresh, Galerie Werner, Pittsburgh, PA
2012 Balance, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, NYC
Constructions + Compositions, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami FL
Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Palm Springs, CA
2011 Anne Loucks Gallery Chicago, IL
James Kennedy
2010 Brooklyn Artist Gym, NY
In the Mix, Galerie Werner Pittsburgh, PA
2009 Juan Bejar/ James Kennedy, Sarah Nightingale Gallery, NY
Nathan Joseph / James Kennedy, Surface Library Gallery, NY
2008 Juried Summer Show, Peter Marcelle Contemporary, NY
Revisiting Abstraction, Surface Library Gallery, NY
Spring Invitational, Eric Ernst, NY
2007 Galerie Werner Pittsburgh, PA
AWARDS
2014 - Golden Foundation for the arts Residency
James Bridie Gold Medal - awarded by RSA
Brooklyn Artist Gym - Best in show Abstract
Landscape
PRIVATE + CORPORATE COLLECTIONS
Waldorf Astoria, NY
British Museum
Corcoran Group
Saatchi +Saatchi
Nordstrom
St Regis Hotel
Grand Hyatt Chicago
Mahinder Tak
Barbara Barry
Edward Albee
Sisti Collection
Vivaldi Partners
Dermacare
Citi Habitats
Frederick Schmleltzer