Feodor Voronov

Mark Moore Gallery announces Relics, the first solo show in the main gallery by LA-based painter, Feodor Voronov. A derivation from his trademark Word Paintings - first shown in the Project Room in 2012 – Voronov's newest works feature his emblematically bold color palette and obsessive mark making techniques, but stem from new source material. His vibrant abstractions of words and letters become monuments to his visual thought process and interest in the interconnectivity of language, thus acting as literal and figurative Relics of his practice.

In establishing his painterly exploration of the socially explicit and implied perceptions of a word, Voronov has visually conceptualized the idiosyncrasies, structure, and comprehension of human communication. Each canvas features an object-like knot of fine ballpoint pen lines, gestural swaths of spray paint, and whimsical bands of marker ink floating within a raw canvas womb, as if illustrating the intricate nature of language's evolution. Voronov's seemingly organic marks co-exist alongside regimented patterns, thus emphasizing the respectively colloquial and formal aspects to our daily parlance. Though he has been working from a single list of vocabulary words for nearly three years, Voronov has now turned his attention to their amassed combination and composition, likening syntax to the analytical configuration of imagery. Inspired by John Chamberlain's 2012 retrospective at the Guggenheim, Voronov drew from the amalgamations of his metal sculptures, impressed by their feigned weightlessness despite their "hulking masses and multitudes of fractured and jumbled planes." Much like Voronov's own work, these assemblages gave material formality to the tensions, balance, and anatomy of composition, be it physical or intellectual. Stemming from this idea, Voronov's Relics reference terms and phrases from a long, rambling paragraph he calls his "piggy bank" – an autobiographical stream of consciousness – that allows for the advanced entanglements competing focal points. More than ever, the viewer will find evolving entry points and altered senses of perspective in Voronov's paintings, analogous to the individualized way in which we converse.

Feodor Voronov (b. 1980, St. Petersburg) received his MFA from Claremont University (CA) in 2008, and has shown at Joshua Liner Gallery (NY), Laguna Art Museum (CA), and Concrete Walls (CA). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Colleccion Jimenez-Colon (Puerto Rico), and the Frederick R. Weisman Founation Collection (CA). The recipient of the 2008 Hernandez Fellowship, and the 2007 Claremont Graduate University Fellowship, he lives and works in Los Angeles.