John Perreault & Mark Van Wagner

MARQUEE PROJECTS is delighted to present our next exhibition featuring the artwork of John Perreault and Mark Van Wagner. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 3 from 5-7pm.

A note from the curator, Beverly Allan Starke:

The first show I curated at Marquee Projects was the gallery’s inaugural exhibit in 2017. It was a tribute retrospective of the work of John Perreault titled It’s Only Art, and was co-curated with Mark Van Wagner, owner of the gallery.

Up until then, I didn’t know much about John or his life’s work as an artist, poet, and notable art critic for the Village Voice, Soho News, and ARTnews. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2015, but over the course of a few weeks preparing for that first exhibit, stories unfolded from Mark about their friendship and how the two had met on Facebook because of their sand paintings while living oceans apart on Kauai and in New York City.

In 2012, Mark and his wife, Tonja, came to Bellport at the invitation of John and his husband, Jeff Weinstein. While visiting, they fell in love with the area and relocated here within a year. Over the course of the next three years, until John’s death, Mark and John forged a deep artistic relationship.

To celebrate the friendship and history of these two artists, I had to convince Mark to let me present their work side by side in one show. I am enamoured of Mark’s new series of sculptures, called Sandboxes, which are made of beach sand from around the world applied to recycled cardboard boxes. They have a raw, visceral, earthy quality, but also a bejeweled aspect when the grains of sand catch the light. Philosophically, I love that one day the materials will disintegrate and return to the earth. And it’s as if his sand paintings have jumped off of the flat picture plane and reconfigured themselves into modular, 3-dimensional objects which can be arranged in endless combinations – very exciting for a curator.

And of all John’s many series, his Scratch Paintings, which he made during the last three years of his life, are my favorites. In contrast to the Sandboxes, these pieces are non-organic and virtually indestructible, made from clean, white acrylic paint applied to insulation panels. These are then drawn into and scratched upon with freeform, fluid, gestural marks, bringing to mind the mark-making of Pollock and Twombly – the lyrical yin to Mark’s yang. John never got to see Mark’s new work, but the two complementary series speak to each other in many ways: organic and man-made; addition and subtraction; expansion and contraction; light and dark; earth and sky.

I am honored to help present this continuation of the dialogue between two artists, colleagues, and – most importantly – friends.