Fritz Chesnut: Floating Windows: AF Projects Los Angeles

Fritz Chesnut

"Floating Windows" - 02/19/22 to 04/02/22
Opening February 19th - 6 to 8pm
7503 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles

AF Projects is pleased to present Floating Windows, an exhibition of process-driven abstract painting by Los Angeles based artist Fritz Chesnut. The exhibition features a series of paintings that continue his material exploration crafting an evolving abstract language where bands of color and line allude to form and images.

Chesnut's paintings incorporate fields of color with an overlaid pattern or skin. Each painting begins flat and he works a base layer of paint onto the canvas. Various tools are then used to make the mark - lines, grids, dots, which are then sprayed with paint across laterally and at times in opposing directions- creating a three dimensional approach to painting that produces an optical effect of highlighted ridges and shaded recesses.

By tilting the canvas and letting gravity take over, the skin of sprayed paint drifts, brakes and warps, at times reforming or spilling off the edge. The resulting works are frozen snapshots of a dynamic event. Open spaces are marred by debris. Fields of color are broken. These paintings mimic the formation of terrestrial surfaces. Chesnut's work has been often described as topographical, alien, otherworldly, apocalyptic, a synthesis of man made and organic.

Equally informed by minimalism, op art and the light and space movement as by Xerox art and DIY punk aesthetics, Chesnut's paintings embody a particular west coast aesthetic.

Fritz Chesnut was born in 1973 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his BA from University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995 and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 1997. He has had solo exhibitions at There-There and C. Nichols Project, (Los Angeles), Country Club, (Los Angeles and Cincinnati), CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, (San Francisco) and Bellwether Gallery, (New York). His work has been seen in such venues as LAXART, Los Angeles, Public Fiction, Los Angeles, Pepin-Moore, Los Angeles, White Columns, New York, The Bronx Museum, New York, and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, among many others.