Bruce Pearson The Cognitive Dissident: Bruce Pearson at Ronald Feldman

Art Critical May 31, 2019

For the seventh time, a Bruce Pearson exhibition fills Ronald Feldman Gallery in Soho with deliberate and emphatic color, convoluted surfaces that verge on sculpture, and cryptic texts which might equally be profound insights or italicized clichés. Pearson has been sifting the airwaves for signals in the noise –– or perhaps noise in the signals –– since the early 1990s, when he first began to make complex, layered abstractions that derived from the outlines of his titles’ lettering. Fear of Death Hope of Heaven Trip to Disney and Not to Interrupt your Beautiful Moment, (2018) from the current show are typically pregnant phrases the artist has plucked from the spectrum of incessant communication, whether talk TV, Language Poetry, self-help manuals or cultural theory. Pearson also works with more epigrammatic texts which lend themselves to reflexive double entendre, such as “Loophole,” “Already Gone,” “Soon Enough,” “Fat Chance.”

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