Statement

"The woven paintings are somewhat rigid in their design: the taut strips of canvas, the sewn hard edges of painted cut fabric, and the precise weave pattern.  If the composition seems stiff, it is tempered by fraying fabric and carefully orchestrated colors.  Like a scent can transport us to a moment in time from our past, so too should each color in a painting when applied with precision and emotion.  The warmth of something familiar might be held together by the strength of tradition, rules, and repetition. 

The paintings present a symbiosis among a network of individual strips within its place in a grid. The autonomous bands feel playfully antagonistic to the more austere interlaced field creating a familiarity with figurative space though grounded in the rudiments of abstraction.  The surface of these painting constructions is initially activated by destroying it through shredding the canvas into ribbons and then gets rebuilt through a harmonious grid of colors into a new structure that never forgets its origin as weaved fabric."  -Dan Charbonnet

"Through construction, destruction, and subsequent reparation, Dan Charbonnet displays the experience of the painting and unravels it.  Reminders of the array of textures inherent to the practice are crafted through raw margins of ripped canvas contrasting with hard edges of value.  Angular formations continually relate to their four-sided boundary, remarking upon but undercutting its rectangularity. Pared down to a minimal color scheme, ribbons of intensity fashion their own picture while suggesting potential palettes for alternate images. The repetitive, rhythmic and meditative qualities native to processes of the medium are emphasized: torn fiber indicates the action of stretching canvases while the recurrence of shapes signals compulsivity and echoed movements essential to painting. Variations in pigment and consistency glimmer and bounce out of the grid, agitated by rips and gaps in the fabric, while their rapport maintains the composition’s underlying discipline. Several dimensions develop optically: the dim background, two layers of textile, and the simultaneous awareness of another view - one without depth: hued ropes enclosed by white, grey outlines cast by shadow, separation by darkness. Patterns emerge out of overlapping, mirrored complexions, and through time spent looking, one continually perceives these ever-proliferating, oscillating arrangements."  -Eve O'Shea