JON MANTEAU To a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

April 1 – May 14, 2011
Artist Reception, April 2, 5 – 8 pm
First Friday, April 1 and May 6, 6 – 8:30 pm

LGTripp Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Philadelphia artist, Jon Manteau. This is Manteau’s third solo exhibition with gallerist Luella Tripp.

The gallery will be transformed from a white cube into an artist’s creative workspace. In this latest exhibition entitled To a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, Jon Manteau makes his mark on the physical gallery space and on the audience. Unrestrained by space or conventional means, Manteau continues to experiment with the themes that have dominated his work for almost 25 years; the warping of the figure-ground relationship, color field, gestural mark-making, scale, attention to formal concerns yet with an extemporaneous approach, and embracing the discarded, eroded and transitory.

Jon Manteau states, “Humans have left behind an astounding catalog of monuments and artifacts, which have contributed greatly to our culture and sense of achievement. There are other things that we leave behind, the seemingly insignificant remnants of cultures past and present, our triumphs and our tragedies.”

In the largest of the work, “Gumtrees and Ghosts” (8’ x 20’), Jon Manteau extends the canvas by integrating painted driftwood inclusions that appear to lift the painting from the wall, confronting the viewer. This site-specific work resonates with the other paintings, works on paper, color saturated wall and free standing driftwood sculptures, a facsimile of the artist’s studio and a documenting video. The video of the making of “Gumtrees and Ghosts” is a testament to the conscious build-up of layers and interaction of fiery colors that define the controlled and intuitive marks left by Manteau.

Defining his work within an historical context, Manteau describes it as Post-Painterly Abstraction or Post-Neo-Abstraction. His influences are Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Miro, Kline, Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Stella, Scully, Richter (to name a few), and more recently Nares and Fonseca. Foremost, Manteau simply states, “I’m a painter”. This is a not-so-surprising trajectory for the young Philadelphia graffiti artist of the 70’s.

Jon Manteau was born in 1963, just outside of Philadelphia. After high school, he moved to New York City to study at Parsons School of Design. At Parsons he studied painting and drawing with Sean Scully. He returned to Philadelphia to complete his undergraduate studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1987). He earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Delaware in 1996. His works have been exhibited nationally and are in collections throughout the United States and Canada.

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