ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Just Say Yes, new paintings by Zachary Buchner in Gallery One.

Chicago, IL, March 24, 2012- ANDREW RAFACZ continues the 2012 season with Just Say Yes, new works by Zachary Buchner. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, May 5, 2012.

Zachary Buchner’s previous series of paintings involved the full translation of his nascent sculptural practice into formidable paintings with expressive, textured surfaces. The final works were as much about sculpture as they were image, the plastered surface thickly poured across the entire canvas, at times containing objects and fragments of previous paintings. This represented a new concentrated approach where the artist, still executing articulated choices about the surfaces and the objects contained by them, was freed up to explore painting space through a rigorous choice of palette and mark making.

By engaging the totality of arguments surrounding the dilemma of painting today, Buchner’s new series of paintings revel in the essential possibilities of materiality, color, and image. Resisting any direct political implications and instead sensitively navigating the complex possibilities available to a contemporary painter, the artist has made paintings where sculptural surfaces threaten to undo their identity as paintings. Colors collide un-ironically and with rapture, and layers of separated processes are stacked to evoke a complex, yet still sublime environment. Stretching beyond his previous impulses to load the frame evenly, his multi-faceted project has become more nuanced. Still retaining a fundamental object relationship to painting, the artist’s hand is imbedded in the process but elegantly detached from the final product.

For Buchner, the notion that paintings should make contact with the world continues to drive the core of his practice. With his continuing interest in the indeterminate but immediate spaces between categories, he engages the history of painting with reverence while generously working within its always current and inherent conflicts.

ZACHARY BUCHNER (Canadian, b. 1979) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 2005. Recent group exhibitions include Let Your Light In at Country Club, Los Angeles; A Person of Color: A Mostly Orange Exhibition, curated by Jose Lerma at Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Under Construction Show at the Poor Farm (The Suburban) Manawa, Wisconsin; and New Icon at LUMA, Chicago. He will be included in the forthcoming Spectral Landscape, curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff, at Gallery 400, Chicago.