Artist talk: Landon Metz
Join us on the occasion of New York-based painter Landon Metz's second exhibition at Waddington Custot, with an introduction to the show from the artist in conversation with ArtReview Editor Fi Churchman at 7pm on 20 June 2024. Please note the amended start time of the talk.
In his upcoming show, Metz proposes a visual aesthetic for an alternative mode of being to the fast-paced hullabaloo of modern urban life. In abstract, languid paintings, Metz pursues a tranquility of form and colour, which viewers are encouraged to experience in a moment of stillness.
Metz cites as a key influence the American avant-garde composer John Cage, who suggested that in 'listening' to silence, we become far more perceptive to the ambient noises that surround us at any given moment. Metz translates Cage's idea to space and canvas, the abstract shapes in his paintings appearing by turns enigmatic, like passing clouds, or suspenseful, like pockets of air trapped beneath a sealed-off surface.
Like Helen Frankenthaler, another of the artist's influences, Metz achieves his abstract forms by the soak-stain method: pouring thinned paint onto unprimed, horizontal canvas. Works are hung floor-to-ceiling above one another, or beside one another; while others appear to fold around corners of the room.
RSVP to rsvp@waddingtoncustot.com
Read more at ArtReview.
