Fantastical Landscapes: Michael Scott

Washington D.C

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Michael Scott: Fantastical Landscapes on view in Washington D.C., at 1932 9th Street NW (Enter from 9 ½ Street) from September 7 through October 26. This marks Scott’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, showcasing historic works ranging from 1994 – 1996. An opening reception will take place Saturday, September 7 from 6 to 8 pm. A full color catalogue with an essay by writer and curator Bob Nickas will be published to accompany this exhibition.

In a radical departure from his calculated, systematic series of line paintings, Scott introduced a newfound representational component to his aesthetic approach in the mid ‘90s, configuring exuberant landscapes rendered in gouache, spray paint, and ink. The bright, jarring color stories across these works allude to figurations within childhood experiences: seemingly replicated from the pages of a coloring book or the shots of an animated cartoon, candy-stripe patterns are suspended in neon enamel paint across natural sceneries of mountains, hills, and trees.

Scott’s contributions to geometric abstraction are marked by their intrinsically reductive properties, emptying identifiable content to accentuate moments of optical tension. Maintaining a similar impact of visual overstimulation, these works are ultimately convoluted in their abundance of banal, nonsensical imagery, reducing the canvas to its sheer culmination of empty signifiers. He overlaps the psychedelic, a state existing within the conscious mind, and the surreal, a state only discernible through illustration, to craft the hallucinatory guise of his landscapes, blurring the boundary between conscious associations and subconscious projections. The large scale of his representations contributes to their immersive nature, physically hindering distinguishability between real and imaginary, rational and irrational forms.

The exhibition title references the optical ambiguities that manifest through these works, transporting the viewer to a dreamy rendition of a two-dimensional world. Muddled in absurdities, this exhibit embraces the disorder and illusion inherent to subjectivity, extending the fantastical peripheries of the mind.