Rodney Carswell
Roy Boyd Gallery
Rodney Carswell’s recent paintings are acts of great cunning: they fuse scrupulous craftsmanship with wry sequences of subtle dislocations that call his entire enterprise into question. He typically employs the pristine pictorial language of Modern geometrical abstraction in slightly skewed and amended forms, altered just enough to keep his compositions tense and expectant. As in the work of Robert Mangold, regularity of design becomes the field for surprising formal disjunctions.
Take, for example, 3 Colors Bordering An Irregular Empty Shape, 1991; here, as always, Carswell lifts his surface