Color Theories, Selected By David Buuck (online exhibition)

About the exhibition

Perusing the NIAD collection can be overwhelming for the eyes, with its amazing variety of forms, styles, and colors. One’s visual sensibilities—if that’s what looking at art could be said to activate—become saturated with a joyful sense of the aesthetic possibilities of color, line, shape, and form, causing at least this set of eyes to have to rethink (or, perhaps more appropriately, re-see and re-feel) what a ‘critical eye’ might actually mean, when the sensorium outstrips the mental faculties conventionally trained to be cool and rational in matters of aesthetic judgment. If I give in to the eye-candyism of delights to be found here, am I merely sharing my tastes and enthusiasms like some kind of pinterest painterist? Or is it precisely in such visual pleasure that one might in fact locate the precise kinds of artistic skills that artists who attend to color, shape, and line use to craft a kind of argument on behalf of such visual abundance? Once I opened my eyes, and opened them again, it became difficult to choose only a handful of the numerous examples of such skill and joy in the use of color and composition. Here are some highlights that I hope will encourage viewers to explore further. 

About the selector

David Buuck is a writer based in Oakland, where he edits Tripwire.