Jeffrey Tover Exhibit at The Grand Gallery By Malcolm Ryder
Abstraction historically describes not a style but a genre.
Saying that out loud of course requires some distinguishing definitions. The simplest are that style is indicative of the individual composer’s preferences. Whereas genre refers to a far more global perspective: what form of a thing is relied upon to create meaning.
A “genre” difference is mystery versus romance; folk music versus jazz. Meanwhile, the range of styles within a given genre can be tremendous. And, the lines between genres can sometimes be crossed by a single practitioner’s style.
The big idea of works within the abstract genre does not come from narrative. But it still comes from how the pictures composition makes us care about something. Abstraction has subject matter.
We might be looking at a portrait or a landscape in an abstract image. But we might be looking at no subject “in” the image; rather, the picture itself – the thing – is the subject. It may be just as with much music that we hear, where what matters is literally nothing more or less than the arrangement of its (sound) effects. The “meaning” is how that arrangement connects us to feelings, memories, questions, expectations, or any mix of those matters.
In much abstract painting, effects have been arranged to intentionally offer evidence of their being created, not just appearing or found. Where we see things have been placed was an actual decision either to deliberately generate it or allow it. That decision is what the work is communicating. As a viewer we then can have the experience of “reading” or navigating the overall image, much like we do a paragraph or like listening to the progression of sound in music. We vicariously re-enact the growth of the piece from nothing to its completion.
Painter Jeffrey Tover’s exhibit at The Grand Gallery is by necessity just a fraction of the body of work that he has produced in the last ten years. But the curated selection on view in this show offers us an opportunity to see both the individual lively acts of composition and something we cannot avoid, the confident and particular titles of his work. Because Tover’s style of abstraction does not derive its power from narratives, we are provoked to consider how the titles are supposed to work.
Tover talks freely about his ambition for his painting. He notes that he “makes marks without a clear plan… When I feel a painting has an emotional impact on me, I know it is close to realization.”
That might imply that he doesn’t have (well, putting it more strongly, doesn’t need)some other guiding principle or statement pressing psychological boundaries or urgencies into his decision-making. He openly intends the “finished” work to be conveying a “physical and emotional journey.” That, says Tover about himself, is an expressionist mode.
But the one word that I think is most on point from his own description of his paintings is “embodiment”. It’s a great word, which not coincidentally describes that music thing that we call singing.
ATASCADERO
PALISADES
So, we are on safe ground with the idea that Tover’s paintings are about… Tover. But as he makes work also with a viewer in his sights, a provocative point of connection is the titles of the work. Are they parallel to the images, or are they clues about them? Did they come before the image began, or after?
With some of Tover’s works, titles seem obviously to label an environment or place that for Tover inspired certain aesthetic choices.
But in other works, more subtle titles might be “prompts” for us to test our own current sense of the work against our sense memories. When we do that and get a strong feeling, it may be a version of what Tover experienced; but not necessarily. People sometimes find it hard to admit if they think they are not “getting the right point” of the work.
But the good news? That room for difference stages a moment when, alongside the artist, we might get two psychological worlds from the same work. A great piece of art can have a pretty long lifespan that way.
Or we might get the idea that we share the world, but within it we might express ourselves or react differently from each other. Despite those variations we could still communicate with each other on a deep thematic level quite well.
AMORPHIC V
QUIETING THE MIND
Before closing out this writing, I think it is valuable to take into consideration that Tover is a teacher and, as we say, “he knows wherefrom he speaks.” All the more interesting, then, that in the small set of works shown in this review, he supplied the one below that stands out starkly from the others.
We just considered how one work can be seen in different ways; but my parting thought here is that the piece, “Line Up”, makes it pretty clear that Tover builds a painting’s formal composition with very conscious decisions about why what goes where.
LINE-UP
Line Up, as usual, embodies Tover’s experience of settling on what will be composed, and that active experience is design. Its elements are simpler, more regular, and seem like they could be moved around at will. But the fact is that here they have come to a balance and have no air of uncertainty about them.
Made more sensitive to it by this piece, we can see that this runs throughout his other works as well, even though they are each truly emergent from his starting each piece without a plan. Sized and offered to live with in one’s home or workplace, design is a key factor of success in his ongoing current practice providing works to collectors. It is interesting to consider the continuum of shared aesthetic experience that he maintains along a path from his own, to that of students, to the final audience.
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About Jeffrey Tover: Tover is an Artist/Instructor/Owner at Jeffrey Tover Contemporary Art, as well as a Commissioner, Arts & Culture Commission, City of Benicia, CA. Additionally, he produces exhibits of local artists in the Estey Gallery, an art space hosted inside a functioning real estate office in downtown Benicia. https://www.jeffreytoverart.com/
About The Grand Gallery: The Grand Gallery is located in Jack London Square in Oakland. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Thursday 12pm to 5pm and Friday through Sunday 11am to 7pm.
About Malcolm Ryder: Malcolm Ryder is an Oakland-based photographer and Bay Area art critic, publishing frequently at Art About Town and Artdotdot.com. The designer and former manager of the Visual Artists Fellowships Grants process at the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently sits on the Boards of Oakland Art Murmur and the East Bay Photo Collective. His work is on exhibit at several satellite galleries in this year’s African Diaspora event.