Essays

Albert Sunjoon Weaver makes abstract paintings. His paintings are modestly sized, usually 12 x 12 inches and employ a compositional structure of three or four horizontal bands of differing color and texture. Within the confines of this small square scale and minimal architecture Albert pushes the subtleties of painting and color relations to a sensual maximum. Within these confines Albert finds and shows us freedom's beauty. The evocative possibilities opened up by small shifts of color, bandwidth, texture, fracture, painted edge and support relations seem endless. Here, as with the sensitive painting of Morandi, Martin, Marden etc. the process acutely observed painting generates further glimpses of things to try, haptic sensations to see and experiences to feel.

Albert's approach to abstraction and to painting is squarely in the camp of those painters mentioned where painting is always about the literal beauty of the material thing and the transcendent magic that occurs when all is, finally, put down just right. Where do we go when this transcendent spark occurs? To the ocean, to death, to simply somewhere beyond ourselves? To beauty itself? I don't know that I am grateful for the heightened experience I feel when looking at a weaver painting, being eternally caught between a Here of crisp wonderous phenomena and a There of enchanted human reverie.

- Joshua Mitchell

Albert Weaver's Paintings are simultaneously pictures of land, water and sky and the magnification of paint peeling on bricks. The modest scale of each painting measures just a few inches larger than the framing of one's face. The experience as a viewer is sensual; an exposure to color combinations that are both subtle and surprising. For me the pleasure in viewing Albert's work is twofold. First is being seduced by the mark-making and surface quality of the paint. The second is the hum of color, both present in each band of paint and the pulse of the middle band sandwiched against the marks that surround it.

Albert layers paint on to canvas or linen through a process of addition and subtraction that results in a surface that is worn and rubbed, scratched and skidded. The canvas becomes a receptacle where a specific physical action occurs and is recorded, like a hand pressed into plaster or fingerprints on glass. Ironically, Albert's work erases the gesture of the hand; the gesture appears to be much bigger and broader, suggesting a roller or squeegee. The surface then becomes the blur of the el train going by Lake Michigan at night or an aerial view of farms in the Midwest.

Although I make references to imagery that Albert's paintings evoke for me, the fact remains that the paintings exist in simple physical terms. Wet paint then dry, layered and removed and layered again until the "right' texture is created. These works invite close inspection: a buzzing of color, small scratches of light coming through, surprising bites of green embedded in a band of gray. Like any painting - these are just paint on canvas, yet Albert's unique process produces paintings that are exquisite objects, a song's refrain.

- Rachel Davis, Chicago, IL