Chuck Webster: Oh My Soul
Chuck Webster’s Oh My Soul will feature a sequence of oil paintings that explore the natural world filtered through a peculiar editorial apparatus, so that unique organic abstractions made of fluid line and lush color contrasts morph into every day familiars. Often the paintings begin with a sort of friendly excision, removing a particular line or shape from an existing work of art or object. Through Webster’s translation, simple forms are glorified to near elemental status, often revolving around such purely natural phenomena as earth, water, fire. As Craig Olson wrote:
Whatever else Webster’s devotional pictures may be, they are undoubtedly pictures of love. A love wrought from meditation that expands outward from the individual to an intuitive vastness, reaching that place within the caverns between our highly specialized senses. It brings to mind new approaches to understanding perception— that seeing is not a purely visual experience, but one in which the mind and body react simultaneously with both learned and instinctual responses. It’s where seeing isn’t really believing, but where it becomes a function of a more essential, unseen harmony.(The Brooklyn Rail, October 2007)
In 2008, ZieherSmith and PictureBox Inc. published Chuck Webster / Eddie Martinez, a two-volume set featuring both solo works by Webster as well as collaborative pieces with Eddie Martinez. Webster’s work has recently been displayed in group exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fred, Leipzig; Daniel Weinberg, Los Angeles; and de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich, among others. His paintings will be featured in Phaidon Press’s forthcoming book, Painting Abstraction, by Bob Nickas, scheduled for 2009 publication. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Binghamton, New York.