R&D (Rosenblum and Doyle): New Formalism in Painting and Photography

The exhibition features seven digital paintings and one large-scale installation photograph exemplifying Doyle’s leadership in illusionist painting with Rosenblum’s mastery of composite photography. Collaboratively, R&D transform the picture plane instantiating animation principles that the computer, as did the camera before it, to permanently alter the way we can see, shape, and understand the world.

At 5 feet by 70 feet, A Studio Visit with Judith Kindler wraps around four gallery walls, immersing the viewer in the studio with multidisciplinary American artist, Judith Kindler. The installation is a tribute to painters and photographers grappling with an exploration of space and time. Dispersed across the pictorial plane, hundreds of digital blocks emulate geometrical deconstructed shapes, forms, and colors. Recalling ideas explored by Pointillists and Cubists, R&D deconstruct visual perception of colors while reframing 3-dimensional subjects on 2-dimensional planes. The compiling of photographic sequences evokes homage to Edweard Mugbridge’s photographic advances in perceiving motion and time. R&D expand upon these advances, incorporating Cinema 4D to animate a comprehensive non-cyclical image with two realities –the original camera view documenting the artist’s studio, and the composed view shifting the geometric blocks forward and backward from the conventional picture plane.

R&D’s digital paintings leave the representational world, entering an abstract space to explore how technology alters perception and experiences. In Adderly, the ribbon-like waves of pink flow as the irregular fin shapes of orange and cream flux into the illusion of the viewer’s space. Named after saxophonist, Cannonball Adderly, the colors and movement suggest rhythm and motion through the abstraction. Doyle states, “Like jazz, our work is best seen and observed over time in order to absorb the aesthetics.”  In Krystna, named in reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, the “abstraction is with attitude, abstraction gone wild.” Similar to A Studio Visit with Judith Kindler, Krystna contains an underlining composite image of an artist studio, Pete Wheeler in Berlin, Germany. R&D manipulate the digital painting through extensive software to remove all imagery of the original camera view, leaving only the colors of Wheeler’s studio to dominate the pictorial frame.

New Formalism in Painting and Photography, on view from July 25 through December 8, 2019, is organized by April Bojorquez, curator at the Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art.  A reception will be held on Thursday, September 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. Visitors will have the opportunity to meet the artists. On Thursday, November 21, R&D will discuss their artistic practice and collaborative approaches. For additional programming and information, please visit, www.stmarys-ca.edu/museum.

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About the Artists: R&D (Rosenblum and Doyle)

Diane Rosenblum, born in San Francisco, California, studied studio art and history at Oberlin College and earned a Master’s of Science at Brooks Institute of Photography. Her work is in twenty museum collections, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Crocker Museum, among others. Rosenblum was an artist-in-residence at the Takt Kunstprojectraum in Berlin, Germany and at the Centre for Substructured Loss in London, England in 2018.  She lives and works in Sausalito, California.

Joe Doyle, born in New York, studied art at San Francisco State and received his Master’s of Art in 1971. Doyle gained national attention for his role in the mid-1970s West Coast Illusionist Movement distinguished by flat, geometric forms applied in a trompe l’oeil manner of painting. By the 1980s, Doyle began integrating digital elements to his paintings. 3D modeling software enabled a shift in his artistic process, as he now explores the formal and theoretical concerns of painting through computational technology. Doyle is one of the founders of the Multimedia Arts Department at Berkeley City College. His work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the Yozo Ueda Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2016, Joe Doyle and Diane Rosenblum joined together to form R&D. Doyle’s artistic shift from painting to inkjet printing interested Rosenblum who created works in dialogue. Collectively, R&D seeks to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and photography through reconstructing the picture plane. In 2018, R&D’s collaborative work appeared in IS Fine Arts in San Francisco, California and The Yard, Organic/Inorganic in Brooklyn, New York.  

Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art

Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art (SMC | MoA) is a landmark for art in Northern California, with a permanent collection of over 5,000 pieces. Inspired by its founder Brother Cornelius Braeg, MoA cares for the most extensive William Keith collection in the nation. MoA provides educational and programming opportunities for Saint Mary’s College of California students and the surrounding community. The Museum is located on the Saint Mary’s College of California campus, 1928 St. Mary’s Road. Moraga, CA, 94575. Admission is free for everyone. MoA is open Wednesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. every third Thursday of the month. For information, call 925-631-4379 or visit the Museum website for hours, programming, and event information: www.stmarys-ca.edu/museum.