Review:
Paracosm by Darren Orange at Imogen Gallery, Astoria, Oregon
September 9-October 9, 2023

by Richard Speer for Visual Art Source

In the 19 years since I first reviewed a Darren Orange exhibition (a 2004 solo show at Eva Lake’s erstwhile gallery, Lovelake, in northwest Portland), the painter has continued a long inquiry into the landscape of the region that nurtured him, the Pacific Northwest. Born and raised in Yakima, Washington, to third-generation apple orchardists, later earning a B.A. in painting with an art-history minor at Western Washington University, he has lived in Astoria, Oregon, since 2000, with the exception of a two-year stint in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During that time, he has transliterated the Northwest’s rivers, mountains, forests, and logging towns into the métier of abstracted landscape. His palette has tended toward earth tones, his gestures toward natural and human-made referents such as the cut of the horizon line across the Pacific Ocean or the span of the iconic Astoria-Megler Bridge, which connects Oregon and Washington. This stylistic and thematic consistency makes his new exhibition, Paracosm, all the more remarkable as a departure.

The 33 oil paintings in Paracosm (all from 2022 and 2023 and created on canvas, paper, wood panel, and aluminum panel) leave concrete referents behind in favor of pure abstraction and trade his customary color palette of browns, blacks, and subdued gray-periwinkles for bright, bracing sherbet hues that look good enough to eat. Nothing in Orange’s prior work prepared me for the pinks and juicy oranges of the show’s centerpiece work, the 7-foot by 5.5-foot “Synesthesia,” nor the lemon-yellows and bubblegum blues in “Proclivity to Shadow the Sun,” nor the scrumptious cherry reds in “Glass Skies.” This artist has always excelled at flowing, self-assured brushwork; in fact, arguably, his most successful paintings have been those in which bravura representational passages verged on abstraction. His current deep-dive into pure gesture seems to have liberated and invigorated him. A centrifugal force animates compositions such as “Thorn of the Recalcitrant” and “Abstracta Botanica,” their crescent-shaped gestures telegraphing mass and motion hurtling outward. The works on aluminum panel, in particular, lend themselves to what he calls “a wild ride in slippery, wet viscosity that makes the painting action fast and loose.” The surfaces are thick with impasto, perhaps a nod to the mutant textures of Anselm Kiefer, one of his big influences.

I place Orange’s style in the company of four Northwest painters of roughly his generation: Timothy Scott Dalbow, Jason Dickason, my late partner Dorothy Goode, and Scott Wayne Indiana in his work circa 2004-2007—assertive, intuitive, and very much in the lineage of Abstract Expressionism. Lucinda Parker and Barbara Sternberger began working in this mode a generation earlier in exhibitions for Laura Russo/Russo Lee and Elizabeth Leach, respectively. That Orange has reshuffled the bones of this approach into something appreciably fresher, having ditched the woodsy hues and heavily varnished surfaces of his incipient years for a brasher, more exultant palette without varnish, evinces a hyperspace jump after two decades of reliably consistent aesthetic.

Although this is his fourth solo exhibition at Imogen, it’s his first in the gallery’s expanded exhibition space, which doubled in size with a remodel in late 2021/early 2022. A light-filled white cube, warmed up by rustic wooden beams holding up the ceiling, it is well suited for large-scale paintings such as Oranges and sculptures such as M.J. Anderson’s, whose show preceded Orange’s. It’s hard to overestimate Imogen’s impact on the Oregon Coast art ecosystem over the past decade. Director/founder Teri Sund opened up shop in August 2012, incorporating coast-based artists such as Anderson and Marc Boone, as well as Portlanders like Corey Arnold, Tom Cramer, and Matthew Dennison, Lauren Mantecón from Santa Fe, and Anne Grgich from Seattle. She has an eye for work that is regional but not regionalist. This is not the place to buy a sunset-and-sand print to cart home as a souvenir of your vacation on Cannon Beach, and while the gallery does have a section for ceramics, glass, and jewelry, the doubling of the exhibition square footage keeps the ratio of contemporary art to craft at around 85/15, which is just about right for an integral but pragmatic seaside art space.

Orange’s abstractions look suave and commanding here, their nubby surfaces, bold gesturalism, and Pop Art palette exuding a heady confidence as they update the painter’s Northwest ethos with an agreeable jolt of flash and verve.