Mel Prest: The Golden Hour
Essay by John Yau
“Mel Prest is a perceptual abstract painter who works in, as well as extends the line of thinking about the relationship between observation and color that originated with Georges Seurat, the first artist to rigorously study theories of color and optics, and how the eye sees.
This is one of the keys to Prest’s paintings–the feeling of being both lost and mesmerized, of trying to discern an order that proves elusive, of experiencing a state of constant fluctuation and ephemerality. These fluctuating states separate Prest from her predecessors as well as conveys her implicit criticism of their use of fixed structures. By making a painting that is structured (lines) yet constantly changing in unpredictable ways, she reminds us that nothing made by humans is permanent, and that what we are subject to are change and time. And yet, rather than making a painting in which the optical vibrations are tightly controlled, Prest pushes her work into a domain in which she accepts chance and the unexpected. She has defined a very different path from the one taken by her predecessors. Her work speaks to our daily apprehension while reveling in the pleasures of light and shadow, natural and artificial colors. We are invited to consider the joys of ephemerality–that which cannot be possessed.”
Mel Prest, "Color Unfolding"
By DeWitt Cheng
“Mel Prest’s ‘Color Unfolding’ exhibition includes sixteen striking abstract acrylic on panel paintings that are composed of stripes. If the overlaid stripes initially suggest the precisionist Op Art paintings of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely, Prest takes a more improvisatory route, eschewing preparatory sketches and the hard-edge abstractionist’s masking tape and instead developing her imagery through paint application, creating the innumerable stripes by hand, so that the slight deviations from machine precision cause the works to breathe visually, even organically. This invites the sympathetic viewer in. The overlapping stripes, sometimes semi-opaque and partially transparent, generate moiré pattens, which suggest transparent gridded planes located in three-dimensional space.
[...]we tend to perceive the works as gently modulated planes: folded papers or cloths. In ‘Sky Film,’ ‘Pink Noise,’ and ‘Heavy Light,’ the colors are so similar, or such natural partners in an Impressionist palette, or the textures so fine, that we see them as woven fabrics, perhaps iridescent, like shot silk.”
Like A Rainbow
By Sheryl Nonnenberg
“‘Mel Prest’s work ‘Jade Emerald’ is a great example of a piece that successfully sits at the intersection of art, science, optics and life,’ [Guest curator Sharon] Bliss said. ‘From a distance this large painting appears to be a solid color field. Closer viewing reveals that it is actually made up of green and blue stripes, in a V converging at the painting’s center. The eye is completed fooled.’”
Look Up to the Sky: Hung Liu’s Legacy of Mentoring Women Artists
By Stephanie Hanor
“Like [Nicole Phungrasamee] Fein, Mel Prest is a non-objective painter whose work is focused on color and perceptual visual relationships. Prest explores color phenomena observed in landscape and light, using color combinations to create optical mirages. The intersecting lines in her works are hand painted, creating a soft geometry that amplifies our perception of movement and color. Her paintings are often inspired by nature, which is always changing. ‘Sun Cloud’ integrates silver gray and yellow to create an immersive canvas that evokes the hazy light and marine atmosphere encountered in the Bay Area.”
The Abstract Now
By Barry Schwabsky
“Mel Prest’s work dissolves the tangible forms that [Jason] Stopa and [Ken] Kelly enjoy. Only one contained shape is left, namely that of the underlying support: a square. Each square is crisscrossed by intersecting freehand colored lines whose interactions generate phenomenal structures that exist only in the eye, not on the physical surface itself. Think of the moiré and other visual effects used in the Op art of the 1960s; though it might not seem obvious, these are remote progeny of the optical mixing of color developed by the Impressionists as they sought greater chromatic vibrancy and luminosity than the old masters’ techniques permitted. Unlike the Impressionists, Prest is not concerned with depicting the natural scene, but she is explicitly inspired by nature: ‘the magic of fleeting color phenomena like mirages, rainbows, the movement of the sky and the ocean.’ In that, sense I might say that, although their works don’t resemble each other in the least, Prest’s paintings embody a close-up view of things that Kelly’s evoke at a distance.”
See What’s Coming Up for Mel Prest
Explore upcoming and past shows featuring Prest’s works.