Carte du ciel #21

Oil on canvas
14 x 18 in. / 36 x 46 cm
Unframed
2011
  
"Years ago in a small Parisian gallery, I bought an etching, a celestial map by the 17th century English astronomer John Flamsteed documenting the positions of the stars visible in the northern hemisphere, with the Milky Way cutting a blue swath through the otherwise mathematical image. On the back, in pencil, was written "Petite carte du ciel", Little Map of the Sky. It was a beautiful and audacious thing to attempt, to condense the endless night sky to a few marks on an eight by ten inch piece of paper. My Carte du ciel and Map paintings, though inspired by Flamsteed, are maps of a different kind. 

"These paintings, careful arrangements of dots, lines and small organic shapes on fields of color, are abstractions that nonetheless invite flashes of recognition. The dots may be signifiers, but of what? Are they cosmic? Microscopic? Atomic? Bacteriological? Radiological?  Within the vocabularies of painting, these works are true to the gap that exists between reality and our perception of it. They offer us something but don’t define it. These are maps without legends."

- D. Gillanders