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| Link to images in Blindsight. Link to Sun Test, a time lapse movie of a year in the life of a painting Link to the artist's resume. |
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| According to author Leonard Shlain in his book Art & Physics, "Blindsight" is the ability to see or visualize that which is physically impossible to see. Jaq Chartier's work is a manifestation of mental abstract images which she intuits and then coaxes out of the surface of her panels. For the last several years, Chartier has been employing strategies of exploration, process, and rigorous testing in the creation of her luminous paintings. Her work captures the unseen moment of the creative process, the crack between cause and effect, space and time. She says, "I have a sense of where to go with my work that isn't direct, isn't visible until the paintings emerge. I bury colors under whiteness, setting up little tests which induce the stains to reestablish themselves in ways that reveal their hidden nature. It's like feeling my way through a white fog and hoping for something unexpected to come into focus." Chartier embraces aspects of Modernism that hold resonance for her, such as Minimalism's exploration of how repetition can both embody and dissolve content. However, the essence of Chartier's painting is color. The works in this exhibition are all color charts of one sort or another. "I've been very focused specifically on painting my whole life, and at a certain point I had learned enough about the materiality of traditional artist's paints and pigments--what each color looks like and what it does in relation to other colors, how they mix together, how they dry, and so on. The whole point of knowing pigments is 'predictability.' But now I'm working with stains which have a tremendous range in the possible ways they interact with each other and with the other materials, and even with light and time. It's much more complicated, and every day I'm learning something about the materials as well as about a particular piece." Chartier works within the realm of chance, and therefore makes rules for herself in order to set up parameters in which to compose the paintings. Each piece has to be a legitimate test of some kind and she often utilizes a predetermined set of questions to allow for the discovery of something new about her materials. "What I'm mostly searching for is the next question, something to spur me on to the next painting, like an endless scavenger hunt." Looking at Chartier's work with its references to scientific exploration and testing, one can see that she cycles back through certain territory again and again to great effect. "As long as something is still interesting to me I figure some part of me is not done with it yet. Maybe there's still something undiscovered there if I keep sifting through it. Or maybe it's the part of the work that keeps the overall trance going, and allows the other subtle shifts a place in which to occur." The resulting paintings provide viewers with a place to do their own contemplation, exploration, even perhaps an opportunity to find their own trance. Chartier's work has been shown nationally and internationally in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Toronto, and this fall in Ahlen, Germany. Her work was also included in the travelling exhibition Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, which was organized by the Henry Gallery of Art, Seattle; and the solo show "Testing" at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. |
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