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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Dennis Hollingsworth Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Dennis Hollingsworthby John McGee "I love paint," says Dennis Hollingsworth when asked to explain his work. That's obvious. His abstract paintings can be exuberant and fun—spiky white lumps and yellow donuts jostle on pastel fields, goopy loops revolve around smears. But Hollingsworth's designs can also suggest the more serious complexity of partially excavated archeological sites or fresh crime scenes through paint that is hidden, exposed and overlapping.  Dennis
Hollingsworth, Nestor
of Pylos, Now firmly planted in the Los Angeles art scene, Hollingsworth moved frequently in his early years. He was born in Spain in 1956 to a US Air Force father and Filipina mother, spent time in the US Navy, and studied architecture in California. But what he really wanted to be was an artist. Hollingsworth cites two moments that clarified his future career path. The first occurred when he returned to Madrid at the age of 13. "It was like a homecoming," he says, recalling the week he spent touring the Prado Museum, where the carnal properties of paint in the work of Goya and Velazquez fascinated him. The artist's other "generative moment," he says, was the Francis Bacon show held in Los Angeles in 1990. "You could count the actions in the paintings. There were lines that delineated space, mists of paint and rub-outs." Hollingsworth also builds his oil paintings in layers and prescribed gestures, using about 10 or so strokes he has standardized—what he calls keys on a keyboard. Working alla prima (wet on wet), Hollingsworth first lays down a background with rubber squeegees, making a smooth surface streaked with color. But this surface won't stay uniform for long. Hollingsworth next uses drywall tools, customized paint brushes with hairs removed, palette knives and other objects to choreograph his erratic loops, violent excisions, fingernail scrapes, and trademark spiky sea urchins. 
Dennis Hollingsworth, Pete Sakes, Some of the motifs might strike a cake decorator with envy or fear, but this isn't abstraction-lite. Hollingsworth is one of the inheritors of the gestural abstraction tradition (think Jackson Pollock) that has passed in and out of favor since the 1950s. But for his generation, this is somewhat unusual. The artist says that when he finished graduate school (at Claremont) in 1991, he felt stifled by the prevailing conceptualist doctrines that favored the idea at the expense of the art object. Proclamations of the death of painting echoed all around him, but Hollingsworth followed his own path—"I celebrate the embodiment of materiality," he says—and plunged into the sensuality of his medium that he had first seen in Goya. Hollingsworth describes his sketches in the Tomio Koyama Gallery office as thoughts on paper. He says that he produces three or four paintings in the same "language" before moving on to something different, and that these are a way of exploring different combinations of colors and other elements. But Hollingsworth won't divulge all the secrets of his paintings. In another statement that could come across as ironic if he weren't so earnest and straightforward, the artist concludes, "Beguilement is necessary." _______________________________________This exhibition was held Mar-Apr 2002 at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Saga-cho, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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