Zachary Wollard
In his recent group of paintings, Zachary Wollard has been exploring the territory between sculptural object and the two dimensional picture plane. Fallen trees from his immediate landscape provide the structural supports and frames for these paintings. As a result, the painted images retract from the illusion of the flat picture plane and enter into a more open dialog with three dimensional objects. Zachary Wollard employs an aleatoric approach to both subject matter and composition without any pre-planning or systemic approaches to generating imagery. The quasi-narrative themes explored range broadly from ecology to biological evolution to politics. Subject matter enters the symbolic realm and suggest something more than obvious or immediate meanings. This inevitably leads to ideas beyond the grasp of reason.
Zachary Wollard likes to include abrupt shifts in scale, style, surface, pattern and setting within individual paintings. Instrumental to the artist’s practice is rigorous art historical research that works in tandem with a chosen theme to a body of work. The paintings contain elements of landscape, still life, figuration, abstraction, and ornamentation, resisting a single genre for a more open-ended approach formally. He is drawn to geographical and painterly locations where juxtapositions of contexts, settings, styles and symbols challenge us towards new and more complex syncretic possibilities. The paint handling is just as likely to push forward the narrative as it is to withdraw from it.
