Lumin Wakoa & Daniel Graham Loxton: On Painting

LUMIN WAKOA & DANIEL GRAHAM LOXTON: ON PAINTING

April 8th – 30th, 2022 

Abattoir presents Lumin Wakoa and Daniel Graham Loxton, two New York-based artists. Both were first introduced in gallery shows last year. Mid-career painters who approach abstraction from decidedly different points of view, both demand close-looking by working on smaller scale canvas and panels. They share a love of paint and its materiality, evidenced by touch and texture in the work. Loxton shares an affinity with the cooler, analytical painting style of Germans such as Michael Krebber, and Belgians such as Walter Swennen. Wakoa, in contrast, has moved from thinking about the outdoors to painting out of doors during the pandemic period. Loxton’s interiority and Wakoa’s increasingly extroverted approach to color in the landscape provide a study in contrasts. 

Their work springs from different sources, one from nature and light, the other from found materials. Loxton builds up his surfaces with a slow physicality, a process he refers to as accretion, in which he collages paper on canvas, attaches fragments of wood, metal or bits of fabric to the support, even creates supports from discarded objects with a former life. For example, Steed is drawn on a chair seat threaded with a looped, braided rope. Many paintings appear borne of the happenstance of the reused support, recalling early 20th century exploits of the Dadaists and later experiments of Robert Rauschenberg. Beyond this, however, the work exudes a love of paint and process, but tempered by an analytical, self-aware influence of the German painters of recent decades. Loxton’s decision to leave paintings in process over long time periods lends a contemplative mood to the work. While exploring nonchalance, he makes small paintings with bold gestures that are carefully rendered within a restricted field. 

Lumin Wakoa paints in oil with a luscious, loaded brush. In the work, fluidity lends a musical rhythm to her brushstrokes. She is a colorist with a deep awareness of art history, embracing diverse artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Joan Mitchell, and Edvard Munch. The markers of landscape are the underpinning, but her works teeter on the border of recognizable forms--- a garden, a tree, flowers, a path--all verging on the abstract. The world to her is a living, breathing, numinous organism and out of its primordial slough forms emerge. She began painting outdoors during the pandemic, adopting a traditional practice with unexpected results.  

She states, I like to dissolve the subject through paint; to dematerialize it. I often paint from direct observation. When looking at something long enough, the boundaries and borders start to morph and dissolve into psychedelia. I bring paintings back into my studio after they have been worked on outside in the world. The paintings must be resolved formally on their own terms and I continue to work on them over weeks or months in the studio.  

The pandemic has altered our sense of time. In a way, it rewards those artists who already tend towards a slow practice.