Visual Art Source is the partnership between ArtScene a California website and Art Ltd. magazine, which is expanding from it’s Los Angeles base and reaching eastward to capture both Santa Fe and Denver and beyond.

I’m writing previews and recommendations for VAS of Denver and Colorado exhibitions. Here are two early entries that were featured in their weekly email newsletter:

Udo Nöger and Katrin Möller at Rule Gallery Denver, Colorado

Katrin Möller, “there is no time – but there is day and night,” 2009

The luminescent “white on white” paintings by Udo Nöger seem to emanate light from within. In fact, they do. The artist uses light as a material, literally capturing it between layers of translucent canvas, oil and acrylic. These painterly mixed media works are sensuous, liquid, and evoke a mysterious depth. There is a dialogue between surface and space, an interplay between energy and tension in this survey of the artist’s work created between 2000-2009. Also on display is the work of Katrin Möller, Nöger’s studio assistant from 1995-2007. In 2008 Möller began painting daily her own series, titled “Gemaltes” (Painted). Whereas Nöger is exploring light, Möller paints essence, particles and atoms-the complex elements of life itself. Both artists share a fascination with liquid, fluid, water. Moller’s forms are amoebic, cellular and spontaneous; she uses earthly colors like damp pine green and Caribbean Sea blue to ground her explorations in the familiar, yet they are ethereally elemental. The exhibition is an archipelago of simple, beautiful, yet dynamic painting.
-Leanne Goebel

Matthew Buckingham at MCA/Denver

Matthew Buckingham. Peace and Anarchy, 2004-2009, black and white fiber prints, c-prints, at MCA Denver. Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York.

A major survey of Matthew Buckingham’s smart and sophisticated conceptual art, curated by former MCA Denver Deputy Director John Grant, this survey features photography, film, slide and other objects, all of which in some way examine our cultural relationships with time and the way the past appears and is interpreted in the present. Buckingham’s works are literary, historical, scientific and contemplative. Whether we are observing the date “1720” projected in Caslon type while listening to Johann Sebastian Bach, or viewing “Peace and Anarchy,” a series of images paired with written reflections on the origins of five popular graphic symbols, through the use of language and images Buckingham transforms our perception into narratives, which are interpreted by others. But even in the interpreting we are reframing and restaging history. Each of the works examines in some way the past and how it impacts or appears in the present. In the end we realize that the more we know, the less we understand (at MCA Denver, Denver, Colorado).
-Leanne Goebel