List Gallery, Swarthmore College, PA
January 21—February 21, 2012
by Jenna Weiss
Logan Grider presents sixteen new works, all done in encaustic on rough wooden panel. Grider has pared his pictorial investigation down to a size where shifts of scale and evidence of physicality are easily observed. On close viewing they become a series of edges butting up against one another, reminiscent of a Stuart Davis tabletop still life. From further away, the natural luminosity of encaustic acts simultaneously as color and light.
You can’t necessarily identify the players in Grider’s paintings, but a potential for action exists – something has just passed or might be about to happen. The titles only hint at what this might be: often a simple verb sets up the idea (Pry, Rehearse, Furrow). Paradoxically, he limits the information being conveyed, yet these paintings do not require prior knowledge. Consider the difference between two types of crossword puzzles, one where the framework exists to be filled in, and the other where only the clues and your knowledge work together to build the structure itself. I had the sense that Grider’s structures emerge in the act of painting, and we are luckiest when we can follow a few of his clues.
Jenna Weiss is a painter working between New York and Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art where she has also taught for the Department of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture.