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Engel Exhibition NotesEXHIBITION NOTES Jules Engel is an artist who creates a visual environment in which he fervently pursues an absolute choreography of line and color through the language of abstraction. An early California modernist, Engel crosses the formal boundaries of painting, printmaking, film and sculpture as he intuitively deconstructs the notion of movement as rhythm. In his 1939 series of paintings, Circles, Engel provides us with a glimpse into an essential interest in visual movement. Engel’s propensity towards cinema is clearly referenced in the design of these early paintings. The circular, colored lines are repeated, juxtaposed to create a rhythmic vibration of radiating movement that travels, simultaneously, to the foreground and to the background, in a forward/reverse choreography that shifts in the viewers’ plane of vision. Each form is drawn in relationship to the other in much the same way that dancers are placed on a stage in relationship to each other. The artist’s interest in exciting a visual surface is indicated in the theater of these early paintings. Engel’s unusual ability to create within the context of fine arts, film and commercial animation was evident early in his career. Parallel to the creation of these late 1930’s paintings of Circles, Engel designed the choreography for the Chinese mushrooms in the Walt Disney film, Fantasia. Indicative of his ability to bring a personal inquiry to color and choreography in commercial animation, Engel was a founding member of the innovative animation studio, United Productions America (UPA), and a partner in his own animation studio, Format Films, where he received an Oscar nomination for an animated film scripted by Ray Bradbury, Icarus Montgolfier Wright. Notably, Engel’s contributions to commercial animation were sourced from his unique predilection to a fine arts aesthetic. Engel the artist and Engel the filmmaker were unified in the visual language of independent filmmaking. Free from any conceptual limitation imposed by commerce, Engel’s films evolved into a marriage of choreography and abstraction when he began to create paintings which moved in time. Engel the auteur is supremely expressed in his live-action, non-narrative film, Coaraze, for which he received the prestigious Jean Vigo Award, the French Oscar. Engel’s subsequent and numerous films were borne out of this exploration, whether filmed as live-action or as drawn, animated paintings. Atypically, Engel’s insistence upon a purely visual language is exalted by the technology of the disciplines in which he creates. A formidable presence, the art of Jules Engel is the art of a facile, finely tuned, and prolific abstractionist who inspires an empathy for dialogue between seemingly different genres. Janeann Dill |
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