March 22 - April 27, 2002

Rudolf de Crignis, Michael Toenges, and Peter Tollens

THREE PAINTERS

Margarete Roeder Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Rudolf de Crignis, Michael Toenges, and Peter Tollens entitled Three Painters from March 22 - April 27, 2002. A reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, March 22, from 6 - 8 PM. All three artists, born in Europe in the early 1950s, have pursued individual practices of painting for over twenty years and each has achieved a discrete, authentic vocabulary. Despite a few biographical and formal similarities (a modestly format, a stringently keyed palette) each artist has most importantly devoted himself to the exploration of painting within a field defined by that field and its materials alone. Self-described and self-defined, they do not labor under misapprehensions of external requirements-the figural, or historical proprieties-the abstract spiritual; here there is no "justified" extrapolation, or inference, but pure invention. De Crignis's paintings are constructed from many layers of blue and white paint with one or more layers of another color, perhaps yellow or orange or teal, deeply inserted into them. These paintings are not illustrations, a visual expression of a theoretical position or agenda, but rather they are a rendering in paint of that which cannot be expressed in language. They exist to denote the paralinguistic, the entirely direct and accessible sensations that the viewer experiences in front of these works. Michael Toenges's work appears the most directly concerned with its medium, the lubriciously entwined brushstrokes engender thickly crusted surfaces of paint. The sinuous, familiar images, so distinct from the crisp environments we experience them in, encourage our attempts to construct referential forms. But the topography of these works exists not in references to the actual geologies of the landscape but in the dense terrains of experienced paint. Peter Tollens, like de Crignis, constructs his paintings from many finely-calibrated strata, however the methods and intents here are entirely different. Applying many layers in a variety of colors Tollens achieves a great degree of inflection, the apparent craftsmanship of his surfaces betoken something atavistic, an almost "Romantic" sensibility. For further information and photographs, please contact the gallery. TOP ©2002 MARGARETE ROEDER GALLERY 545 BROADWAY FOURTH FLOOR NEW YORK CITY