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Over the past three decades Mark Emerson has refined a practice of combining bold colors and fractured shapes. His works consist of colliding vectors and kaleidoscopic voids that, when churned by a polyrhythmic approach to composition, cleave labyrinthine paths out of interpenetrating geometric forms. If that sounds complicated, well, it is. Its roots, traced backwards, run from Neo-Geo in the 1980s to hard edge abstraction at mid-century to Russian Constructivism in the teens.
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noteworthy aspect of this painting is that each of the individual squares can be seen as standalone compositions, much like the abstract components of a Chuck Close portrait; only here they’re rendered in the blocky manner of Helen Lundberg (1908-1999), who, like Benjamin, may have at some point whispered across history into Emerson’s ear.
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The remaining paintings in this series bear a closer resemblance to earlier works in which the aforementioned polyrhythms were more pronounced. Like those in Latin jazz, they interlock and drive forward, presenting disparate pieces as a unified whole. The best examples are Touch Points and Just Like You & Me: "action paintings" built not of bodily gestures, but of carefully apportioned geometric snippets – stolid shapes that, in Emerson’s handling, bend our perception of the space inside the frame.