Abstract
LAMONTAGNE Gallery Is Pleased to Announce the Opening of Joe Wardwell, “Maybe Partying will Help” a new collection of paintings. Realists collect things, they assemble the pieces of the world, making walls from rocks, homes from bricks, sentences from things, museums from images. Idealists on the other hand traffic in symbols, allegories metaphors. Joe Wardwell is a realist. The landscape paintings of the American West and the Hudson River that sparked Joe’s current project are idealist visions of far more than the wilderness. Waterfalls symbolize national power, train tracks progress, sunsets impending war, parting clouds God’s grace. This isn’t reality, its dreams and politics. Sketches made in the woods of tree stumps and boulders – those are real. Those are rocks like the ones broken by Gustave Courbet’s laborers or used to pave the streets in Robert Henri’s New York. Realists collect rocks.