Jukkala show opening tonight at Giampietro Gallery

Giampietro Gallery — Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Clint Jukkala: Even If and Especially When
Sept. 9—Oct. 7, 2011.
Opening reception: Fri., Sept. 9, 5—8 p.m.

Press release

Fred Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present Clint Jukkala: Even If and Especially When, an exhibition of recent paintings opening September 9 and on view through October 7.

Clint Jukkala’s new paintings offer portals into sensory worlds of color, geometry, and remembered experience. Ostensibly abstract, they refer to the real world, suggesting interior spaces, windows, and landscape vistas. Through framing and reframing, the paintings unfold, creating pictures within pictures and spatial ambiguities.

Emerging from the tradition of geometric abstraction, Jukkala’s work plays with its conventions, making paintings that are at once reflective and irreverent. Rationality gives way to the realm of psychology, memory, and daily life. Structural forms are painted with a direct and wobbly hand. Hints of sky and water are squeezed between lines and rectangles, offering a possible escape from a reductive flatland.

While super-saturated color has long been the driving force in Jukkala’s work, his recent paintings introduce the element of highly textured surfaces. The play between flatness and illusion is heightened as paint alternates between thin, dyed grounds, and heavy impasto. The varied surfaces expand the sense of pictorial depth and the physicality of the paintings.

Suggesting both doubt and conviction, Even If and Especially When, evokes possibility and the yearning for future things to come. Taken from the album title of the psychedelic garage band, the Screaming Trees, Even if and Especially When, echoes the desires, contradictions and ambiguities inherent in Jukkala’s work.

Clint Jukkala (born 1971, Missoula, MT) received his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and his MFA from Yale University. His work has been shown at Feature Inc., and Envoy Enterprises in New York, The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, PA, and Soil Gallery in Seattle. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.