Charles Mason III: Whose Pain Do We Acknowledge First?
Goya Contemporary Gallery
Jun. 12, 2024 - Sep. 18, 2021
The Baltimore based artist and educator creates abstractions around identity politics and the “performative act of blackness” experienced and manifested through physical materials. Capturing the pulse of the city, and the beat of his own drum, Mason is “far more interested in creating spaces that allow for the audience’s own experiences of engagement with black identity.”
Mason’s improvisational constructions or ‘sculpt-paintings’ are a non-traditional style that explores layers of personal expression through use of color, form, gesture, and texture, while remaining grounded in social realism. The artist’s work focuses on individual experiences, as well as police brutality, loss, and the generational trauma experienced by black Americans as a result of systemic racism. Mason seeks to reveal the essence of emotion and self-expression through material accumulations. Working between media, fluidly moving from paint on canvas to works made on, or of torn, printed, and impressed upon paper; Mason’s constructions are more about experimentation with materials to achieve an emotional response than they are about constraining himself to a defined and limited media.
The art historical narrative of American Abstraction has been told with an inordinately white cast of characters, misrepresenting the authentic story of abstract practitioners. More recently, Black artists’ contributions to the amplification of contemporary figuration have been acknowledged, almost to the point of erroneously pigeonholing all POC’s into the category of figuration.
As the art historical field makes corrections, acknowledging the significance of black abstract and expressionist painters of the past such as Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, Al Loving, Howardena Pindell, Norman Lewis, and Ed Clark; we come to comprehend their influence on the contemporary practitioners of our day including– among countless others– the work of David Hammons, Tomashi Jackson, Julie Mehretu, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, and Charles Mason III.
Where Mason certainly is aware of these artists and the influence they have on his practice, he has developed his own distinct vocabulary that engages a type of call and response between painting, printmaking, photo transfers, collage, performance, photographic appropriation, and life experience.
Dragging material across the surface of his complicated matrix, Mason creates passionately charged works that convey an array of complex messages that we cannot effortlessly untangle, and that we certainly cannot easily forget.