Letter of Recommendation to Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

November 25. 2018 - by Howard N. Fox

“Daniel Aksten's 'Support, Edge, Variation' gentle, jittery”

May 18, 2012 By David Pagel, Los Angeles Times

At CB1 Gallery, all but one of Daniel Aksten’s 10 new paintings in “Support, Edge, Variation” call to mind Minimalism. Their sharp edges, solid colors, geometric compositions and spray-painted surfaces appear to embrace the same rigorous regimentation of that keep-it-simple style from the 1960s.

The oddball, “Phanorama (Line, radius),” suggests that Aksten is too promiscuous a painter to be a Minimalist. At 5-by-5 feet, it’s the largest work in the show. It’s also the most pictorial, with solid bands, overlapping shapes and spindly linear elements evoking a tabletop still life.

Just a touch of its goofy, cartoon playfulness suffuses Aksten’s other oils on aluminum, whose compositions are simpler and whose palettes are almost always limited to two or three colors, one of which is black, white or silver.

Aksten’s idiosyncratic grids and out-of-step stripe paintings do not play out the possibilities of a single format so much as they set up structures whose elements slip out of place, as if sneaking off to pair up with other elements. Both gentle and jittery, these little movements reveal subtle shifts in color, which keep you coming back for more.

“Hypnotic Op-Art Makes You See Double”

Daniel Aksten’s ‘Support, Edge, Variation’ Hit CB1 Gallery

May 8, 2012 By Priscilla Frank, Huffington Post

Daniel Aksten's new exhibition asks you to not just to look at shape and color, but to experience them. As the show's title "Support, Edge, Variation" connotes, pattern plays a major role in the works. Yet there are also associations to safety, danger, newness, tradition and change buzzing throughout both the title and the works. The minimalist paintings serve as fields of vision, transporting you to an entirely different experience through switching a color or shifting over a line.

Aksten has long been interested in concept over subject, experience over representation. A previous collection of his works was made in subservience to a system involving the roll of a die. Aksten's geometries privilege chance over the artist's vision; because of this, an otherworldly energy circulates throughout Aksten's visual fields. The geometric forms, relentlessly crisp, begin to vibrate and shift before your eyes, recalling both California's 'Finish Fetish' movement and the hypnotic Op-Art of Julian Stanczak.

Inviting you into the visual realm where the simplest forms are the hardest to fully experience, Aksten asks of his viewers something different than most other artists: his electric geometries ask you to really look.

“Haiku Reviews: Brancusi, Bach and Beat Boxing”

June 30, 2012 By Peter Frank, Huffington Post 

Daniel Aksten and Ardishir Tabrizi both dazzle the eye with bright, discordant colors, elaborate forms, and a deliberately destabilizing approach to the art object. Aksten's subversive approach combines highly stable, recognizable, even reassuring shapes, geometries or at least hard-edged silhouettes riven with lines and patterns of interference. He piles system on system, motif on motif, freighting the resulting compound image with elusive references (in great part to modern and post-modern tropes like the grid) until the eye and mind hurt so good. There's an element of comedy to Aksten's methodical excess, buoyed by an undercurrent of joyful silliness, as if he were puncturing the intellectual pretension of (especially late-modern) abstraction by extending it ad absurdum. Tabrizi, for his part, begins with the presumption of such visual and informational density. His layering of pattern on pattern, shape on shape is far more tumultuous - and yet ultimately far more decorous - than is Aksten's. There seems to be a wealth of reference and suggestion in these free-hanging, almost banner-like shaped painting-drawings, but Tabrizi engages the references in such a frenzy of mutual ingestion that they forget to mean what they originally seemed to. Tabrizi's spectacularly elaborate compositions point at a spiritual discourse much as Aksten's point at an intellectual one, and the occasional figural or at least worldly reference (a hand, a map) only heightens this straining at the metaphysical. But it also suggests that Tabrizi's intention is no less subversive than Aksten's, challenging us to work for our transcendence - and have a good time trying.

Daniel Aksten

February 2010 By Jeannie R. Lee, ArtScene

Quirky, pixilated paintings by Daniel Aksten are the highlight of this inaugural show, “Difference and Repetition.” Uniform metal panels explore a restrained palette (red, grey, yellow) with taped grids and squares with rounded corners. Featuring both what the artist refers to as “portraits” and “landscapes,” each work is a result of calculated construction and arbitrary randomness determined, literally, by a roll of dice. Interestingly, the carefully masked and unmasked marks of automotive paint refer not so much to the future as it once might have, given that the computer byte metaphor has ceased to arouse such associations. Even the subtle basket-weaving texture of the paint layers points to craft and the artist’s hand in a way that makes one think about how the word “modern” has come to seem “old-fashioned.”

Daniel Aksten: Material

Sept. 2010 By Shana Nys Dambrot, Flavorpill

Daniel Aksten's images, despite their intense visual crispness, blur the lines between several kinds of modern and contemporary painting conventions. He uses a super-flat enamel-based automotive-finish paint, building topographic surfaces through layering rather than impasto. The engaging, almost candy-flavored quality of the paintings draws the eye, yet their shifting, de-centered structures keep the eye in relentless motion. His sleek and seductive palette is neither organic nor wholly artificial; and his grid systems are reminiscent of both Mondrian's geometric exuberance and the abstracting effects of digital pixelation, without reference to any representational or narrative inspiration. In fact, Aksten literally rolls the dice to engineer his compositions, further and most finally seeming to remove the hand of the artist from these most lovingly crafted and labor-intensive of artworks.