Artist Eric Magnuson (see BRO profile) is preparing for his biggest show in Buffalo to date. A decade of selected work will be showcased at the Resource Art showroom in The Belesario (520-522 Main Street) on Thursday, June 16. The artist will be on hand to discuss his works, a number of which have never been seen by the general public.
Eric Magnuson’s practice explores the history of westernized painting as sign, language as landscape and semiotics as subject.
The crux of the work is an artistic play on words, which is meant to rattle the thought process. There are subliminal mixed messages, and bold statements, fused together on painted canvas.
The artist explains: “As topography is to landscape, typography is to language. The words and sentences we speak and write form our cultural and social landscape. We look through our language to see ourselves. We read through the terms of our vocabulary toward a horizon of self-definition. Idiom, lexicon, and vernacular form the lens through which we see and understand the world. I consider painting to be a convention, a language of seeing, and in turn I consider language as malleable and as viscous a medium as paint. I therefore paint with language and the supporting materials of pigment and linen/canvas are allowed a textural as well as textual voice within this physical aesthetic activity and historically charged genre.”
Ten Years Gone: Selected Work by Eric Magnuson 2003 – 2013
The Resource: Art Showroom at the Belesario | 520-522 Main Street | Buffalo, NY | 6 PM – 9 PM | See Facebook