The affinity between Don Voisine and Ruri Yi is right there in black and white — and their sparing use of color. The two artists, paired in Pazo Fine Art’s “The Spaces in Between,” are of different backgrounds and generations. But both paint hard-edge geometric abstractions whose occasional irregularities are carefully calculated.
Voisine is a Maine-born New Yorker whose designs were initially derived from the floor plans of apartments where he worked on renovation crews. The works in this selection, all made between 2011 and 2020, mostly center on large black forms that are bracketed at top and bottom by brightly hued bands. The compositions appear formal and stationary, yet have a swooping energy and are enlivened by color contrasts that range from subtle to emphatic.
All but one of Yi’s paintings in this show arrange lozenges on white fields. The Seoul-born Baltimorean varies the 2019-2022 pictures by rendering a few of the identical shapes in various colors other than black, and by occasionally allowing one to slip out of alignment. In one of her pictures, for example, a line of black forms is gently disrupted by a purple one that nudges the upright one to its left. The effect is quietly comic, and also a statement of artistic control. Yi can arrange her paintings with precise predictability, but she doesn’t have to.
