Jon Madsen: Alternate Routes

April 25 - June, 2008

Jon Madsen received his BFA and MFA from the University of Wyoming in the early 1970’s. In his vibrant and graphic paintings, he re-imagines the flat, endless horizontal spaces and roads of the Wyoming landscape, changing them into fractured kaleidescopes of color, light, shape, and shadow. Gravity and normal perspective are turned upside down in his art, as he uses paint to explore the weight of light or the mass of land and road from a geologic perspective. His paintings dwell on a landscape that has been marked upon by the presence of the human by strips of road with exaggerated white lines, rather than the romantic vistas of western nature where the human element is edited out.