Don Voisine

Dedicated to a reductive abstract vocabulary of hard-edged geometric painting, recognized New York artist Don Voisine mines the possibilities of his signature small scale works to create taut, architectural, and elegant compositions, activated by nuance and spacial tension.  Writer Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times states, “Don Voisine has developed his brand of highly synthetic abstraction for more than 30 years with a process illuminating the rich fusion of Modernist sources with a meticulous exploration of the mechanics of painting.” Voisine’s hyper-focused abstractions executed in oil on panel explore the seemingly limitless possibilities of a standard format of overlapping geometric fields. These dominant, centralized fields of black are layered and articulated by directional brushwork, in both matte and glossy textures.  Their bold forms are laid over neutral grounds ranging from cool whites to creamy, warmer tones and bracketed by bands of charged, or contrasting, unexpected color. Despite the amount of visual weight each painting accumulates, the compositions communicate a strong sense of contained space and underlying movement.  Voisine states, “I’ve always strived for an “essence,” whether of place or of a specific space, that’s part of what initially appealed to me about abstract art.” Through shifting light or by proximity to each surface, the various elements in the artist’s  iconic scale works, such as the white and the range of matte or glossy black, can often be read simultaneously as either positive or negative.  The contrasting potent colored borders further ignite the black forms and allow for playful suggestion and the subjective as their boundaries are pushed.  Writer Roberta Smith further states, “Within their prosceniumlike borders, Mr. Voisine’s dark geometries enact telling dramas of texture, shape, symmetry, color, edge and light – in effect, all of painting’s grand illusions – especially when given your undivided attention.”

Don Voisine attended the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine and the Rochester Institute of Technology, His work is in numerous permanent collections including: Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, University of Richmond Museum, Richmond, VA, Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT, National Academy Museum, New York, NY, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME. He was the recipient of the 2011 Purchase Prize, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Purchase Fund Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 2008 Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, National Academy Museum, New York and a 2006 Artist’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.