ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Afterimage, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Scott Wolniak..

Chicago, IL, February 6, 2010 – Andrew Rafacz begins the 2010 season with new works by Scott Wolniak in Gallery Two. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and continues through Saturday, March 13, 2010.

Throughout his career, Scott Wolniak has used drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and installation to experiment with form and content and their inherent relationships. He utilizes a multidisciplinary practice to undo any formal notions of one medium’s priority over another and the results are an investigation into how art-making can be a template for examining everyday occurrences and experiences. Far from an insular project of the artist in his studio, Wolniak’s constructions remain poetic and vital through an openness and humor. His work often reveals the process with which it was made, simultaneously offering a visceral experience and a conceptual resonance.

At the beginning of 2009, Wolniak presented a series of bleached and folded works on a paper. Titled “”Simulated Sunprints,”” they simulated natural effects with artificial means. With Afterimage, the artist has pushed his process to its limits, ‘abusing’ the medium to elicit new possibilities both in materiality and image. Individual pieces of colored paper are folded in different patterns and sprayed with bursts of bleach and ink and repeated. Spray paint, acrylic paint and collage are occasionally added afterwards. Folding enhances the fading, staining and final color effect, establishing the distinct structure of each drawing. These pieces are suggestive of natural forms but never depart from abstraction. There are connotations of weather and time, as well as pollution and geography. The bleach brutalizes the paper, damaging it to its core, while producing gorgeous visual transformations. The ink battles the bleach, positive versus negative. Like the sunset that is prettier because of smog, these works are formally intricate meditations on dualism. The artist has further defined this relationship between figuration and abstraction by suggesting, through their parenthetical titles, humorously contrived scenic projections to describe these Rorschach-like compositions.

SCOTT WOLNIAK (American, b. 1971) lives and works in Chicago. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include Ungray: Color, Light, and Other Balms at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2009 and New Work at Proof Gallery, Boston, MA, in 2008. Patterning, a solo exhibition at Chambers@916, Portland, OR, runs concurrently with this show. You Can Lose Your Balance, a solo project at 65Grand, Chicago, opens later this month. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Peter Norton, Santa Monica, CA; Peter Stern, NY; Sonke Magnus-Muller, Berlin and numerous other private collections in the U.S. and Europe.