Untitled

The materials that Ned Vena often uses in his work—adhesive vinyl, spray paint, enamel, stencils, aerosol spray rubber, and acid—relate to street art, graffiti, commercial signage, and vandalism. His abstract works meld the conceptualism of high art with the materials of low art, commerce, and industrial production. Untitled is one of body of work created by Ned Vena between approximately 2008 and 2012. To create the artworks, Vena utilized Adobe Illustrator to create a stencil that was then cut from vinyl and applied to raw or primed linen. He then sprayed rubber onto to the masked linen, imparting the final design, seen when the vinyl was removed, leaving only remnants of oily aerosol. Vena calls this “bruising”—a relic of the artist’s hand and labor in an otherwise mechanized process. At first, his compositions of geometric patterns and parallel lines may appear rigorous, homages to Frank Stella and other minimalist artists. In paintings like Untitled, where the subject is a symmetrical minimalist design, however, each quadrant is off kilter, slightly torqued to the painting edge and to one another, revealing an uneven black border. In addition, the residual mottling of the linen creates variegation that, along with the sprayed rubber, increases the perceived dimensionality of an otherwise two-dimensional work, both acknowledging and denying the picture plane. In his use of the computer as part of his process, his emphasis on labor and production, and his ironic self-reflexivity, Vena has often been compared to artists such as Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, and Cheyney Thompson.