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Decoding Color
Decoding Color features two large-scale paintings by Buy Shaver. Buy synthesizes the world around him into large, high-contrast swaths of color. The bright hues in his panels simplify complex subject matter into just a few brushstrokes. Without using shading or a vast amount of detail in his work, he challenges us to reconsider how we see, interpret, and feel space through color and shape alone.
Buy Shaver’s site-specific pieces are minimalist, often containing only a few phrases and a handful of colors. He reflects on how we might catalog our life experiences similarly to how presents are gift-wrapped, a meaningful object momentarily summarized by a colorful box. He begs us to consider: How can intricate subject matters be categorized into minimal selections of colors and shapes?
Buy Shaver
He/Him
Bio
Philadelphia artist Buy Shaver primarily works site-specifically joining his work to its ideal location or creating work for a specific venue. He creates abstract compositions and text-based work that appear simple, direct and seemingly familiar yet the content and context allow for multiple interpretations. It is this combination that allows his work to be at once straightforward and uncomplicated yet oddly illusive.
He is the author of Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design—A Visual Primer and an Associate Professor at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Statement
When I was young, I remember my mother and I would walk through the department store to a small room in the back where purchases were wrapped. There, on the wall were different combinations of paper and bows mounted on boards the size of shirt boxes. These tasteful combinations represented important events -- birthdays, weddings, holidays, and graduations. As my mother chose her wrapping, I had mixed feelings seeing life’s events reduced to a particular paper and accompanying bow. Yet there was something comforting too -- the hope of a wrapped gift, the coding of an event using color and ribbon, the simplicity of the display, even the melancholy inherent in a pre-determined choice.
Like my memory of choosing gift-wrap, my work similarly celebrates life’s moments but more specifically, the recollection of those moments that often go unheralded.
This drive to simplify and encode my life’s events, memories and thoughts extends to my text-based work. These pieces appear simple, accessible, and seemingly familiar yet their content and context allow for multiple interpretations.
