gabriele Evertz
perceptual abstraction
(and acrylic)
greenport

To try to “explain” gabriele’s art would be futile. you have to experience it, the closer the better. it’s like the calm you feel after being in a loud place and you get in your quiet car and it’s just a hum around you. it makes sense she calls her paintings her partners. she is interested in the way we see and the way we learn by seeing, comparing and contrasting images, ideas, colors. vertical stripes? yes, just like a line of people at a grocery store, gabriele sees the stripes as erect humans. buildings. trees. and as you look at them, as you engage, you see things shifting, but she didn’t paint shifts.

the content of my work is color and i’m using geometric shapes because i want the viewer to know what they’re looking at. and then a minute later it changes and pulsates—and that’s really life. it’s always moving.

people think geometry is very static, but it isn’t. it’s moving all the time. i’m keeping the same color sequence but changing the background. so as you engage in it, it changes. the colors are the actors.
these are really vessels of contemplation.

after a while you start to realize there’s a center and an organization to it. painting has to be a certain scale. when it’s small, you slip through it, like a window. i wish i could work even larger. color really wants to have a presence. and the larger a work is, the more effective the color interaction can be.

change the color by one step and it implies a line. but i haven’t actually painted the line. i’m interested in showing a situation that is split, because that’s the way the world is. we desire harmony, but i really had a need to express that things are a little off.

i’m not expecting anybody to ‘get it,’ just look at it. mine is expressive, but not in a way that i draw attention to myself. a painting, for me, is there to be looked at.

the choice in color is a very important thing. it’s based on the 12 colors of the color wheel. that’s the spectrum. and they are the most intense. and there are partners (red and green, for instance).

i leave it up for interpretation. you see what you know. this is the motion parallax—you see differently as you move your head.

the contrasting colors pulsate and come forward into your space. it embraces you. without the viewer the painting is dead, it’s in sleep mode. it really requires a viewer to activate the whole experience.

and it does. even if you sit with your back to her 17-foot panel, you’ll hear it. it will creep in around your whole sensory being, gently throbbing, pulsating, blowing at the hair on the back of your neck.

motion parallax series “leaf”, photo courtesy artist