A Painting. Not Just Paint.
By Brian Hutler

Art criticism is sort of like writing a stylistic instruction manual for art. A critic, like a coroner, cuts into an artist's work and, with morbid zeal, exposes its guts to the public. Then of course, people copy the artist's style, and the whole thing becomes cliché. Aristotle, for instance, cracked the code of tragedy, thereby destroying it as an art form, relegating it to the status of cheap sentiment. To keep ahead of the critics, new artists create new styles and methods—new memes, new forms—that are themselves, in due course, dissected, packaged and eventually sold.

It's easy to suppose, perhaps, that criticism survives on some kind of symbiosis with art—like the bacteria that help us digest food. Easy to suppose that art requires our analysis of it, just as god requires our worship. With no impetus to innovate, artistic form will stagnate. Criticism destroys art, but destruction fosters innovation—like a forest fire nurturing fresh vegetation, creating a new environment, trying out different genetic lines. This is the system.

But sometimes artists fight back. Kevin Fey's collection leaves no exposed flesh for the critic to cut into. The work bears its process on its face; in a way it's all process. There's no need for an instruction manual. Kevin Fey's work is not only not representational—i.e. abstract—but it's not even a work at all. Not an expression of anything. Instead, it's an act of nature. It's an organic life form. Or a rock formation. It just is.

Kevin Fey's work invites us to be geologists for a while. Paints drip. Solvents dissolve, corrode—erode, even. We're not looking for seams and rivets. We're looking for geodes and mineral deposits. The works are earthy—like an old log that someone has decided to use for an end table. Or perhaps better, like the glass created by meteors crashing into the surface of the moon and melting the soil. Haunting, exotic, and completely determined by the simple scientific laws of the universe.

But we are only human. For whatever reason, we've got this core-level drive to understand—this longing not only to figure out what something represents or what it does, but for there to be a Creator behind it somewhere that pumped it full of intention and purpose and beauty. A painting is not just paint.

So Kevin Fey's work turns us into religious fanatics too. There's no way the eye could have just evolved, right? The atmosphere: lucky chance? That drip of solvent: totally random? There must be something deeper going on. And now we're back to being critics. Not so much coroners, anymore, as priests, shamans, looking for omens in the entrails. Looking for some sign from the Creator, some order in the cosmos.

But maybe all along we were not decoding, not destroying the art. Maybe the art is decoding us—reflecting hidden little corners of our psyche. Maybe, after all, art criticism is more about the critic than the artist--which explains why criticism, like translation, is perishable while art is not.

So, turns out it's our own guts we've just been poking around at, looking for clues. And it is, finally, this narcissism, this drive to see yourself in everything, that Kevin Fey's work exposes, mocks, celebrates.

Brian Hutler is a doctoral candidate at the UCLA School of Philosophy.


Visual Pathways
By Catherine Y. Serrano

As you enter Kevin Fey’s studio, the walls lined floor-to-ceiling with his 48 x 48 inch paintings, your eyes dart impulsively from one canvas to another. Light plays with color, shifting reality so that discerning what is part of the painting and what is a reflection bouncing off the window becomes tricky. The afternoon light pours in while your field of vision expands. It is like a sensation I had while inside James Turrell’s Dhātu (2010) installation, which created an immediate awareness of the relationship between vision and your other senses.

Dhātu (2010) is entered by ascending a series of steps into a white room framed by three light tubes that subsequently bathed the space in gradations of color prescribed by the artist. Varying in hue, intensity, and brightness, colors change while your body and vision react. Although wonderful, you are a passive receiver of the events pre-determined by the artist. It is the element of ‘activity’ that makes the paintings on display in “Kevin Fey: Color Unbound” diverge in their relationship to the viewer.

Utilizing effects of color, proportion, and perception, Fey’s abstract paintings are a platform for the viewer to have an individual encounter and to navigate their placement within - or in relation to - each work. We all read colors differently and our reactions may change according to their distance and intensity. The physical components of each piece become the keys to our own interpretation while color becomes a point of departure.

As expressed in Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing, “the extent to which perception and, consequently, vision are dependent upon memory and imagination as a matter of everyday experience. We see familiar things more clearly than we see objects about which we have no stock of memories.” As form and traditional narrative are absent from Fey's paintings, we are meant to draw new associations and sensations. Representation is replaced by visual pathways of color that the eye must actively work through, and each display a different occurrence.

Fey’s explorations of the medium are most evident in the intimate sized 4x4 inch paintings which appear more sculptural and object-like. Created by allowing paint to dry while the canvas stands upright or through hammering cracks into dried resin, these smaller pieces lend insight into the reactionary, inquisitive and experimental nature of Fey’s process. They are time-captured instances of creative exploration – those which pave the way to the more calculated and meticulously rendered larger-scale canvases. Together, the spectrum of works in Kevin Fey: Color Unbound amplify our visual awareness, offering an environment to experience vision and abstraction as a sensation.

Catherine Y. Serrano is an independent curator based in New York. Most recently she was Exhibitior's Assistant at Frieze Art Fair. From 2010-2012, she collaborated on projects in London at Whitechapel Gallery, Bloomberg SPACE, Seventeen Gallery, The Showroom, and the British Government Art Collection. She completed her MA in Curating from London Metropolitan University and has been published in SouthEast Zine and Reading Complex V- Postscript.