Melisa Taylor Metzger’s The Seismology of Cantilevered Hearts 5 transforms a circular wood panel into an ethereal, pastel composition that explores the sublime. This piece features a soft palette of creams, blush pinks, muted golds, and smoky grays, evoking a sense of delicacy and atmosphere.
Using pyrography as a mark-making tool, Metzger layers spray-painted color fields, stencilled shapes, and painted grids. The hard-edge geometry contrasts with optical blurs and atmospheric transitions, creating a delicate interplay between structure and fluidity.
The linear grid anchors the design while serving as an illusionary device, creating depth and movement that oscillate between the tangible and the ephemeral. Through this piece, Metzger reimagines pyrography combined with grid painting as a contemporary visual language, exploring resilience and the harmony between control and chaos.
This piece comes ready to hang.
Keywords: pyrography, sanding, materiality, electric tools, soft, blurred, complex, hard-edged, dynamism, line, form and color, multilayered, Multichromatic, geometry, grid, atmospheric, optical, Abstract, Minimalism, Modern, Abstract Expressionism, Spray Paint, Acrylic, Wood, stencil, op art, contemporary gestural abstraction , stripes, repetition, linear grid, painting, chance, serial formalism, gradients, pixelated, visual perception, process-oriented, burnt and charred, tondo, circular, shaped
About the artist:
In Melisa Taylor’s work, the natural world acts as blueprint while ideas are sourced from historical art and contemporary culture. She pursued studies in Marine Biology before training in classical art of the Old Masters. She grew fascinated by the works of Flemish painters Vermeer and Rembrandt whose symbolic use of light influences her practice up to this day. Melisa explores the notion of the sublime through blur and precision. She develops an aesthetic of duality by hybridizing divergent approaches to art. Her studio practice is labor-intensive; various instruments and electric tools are used out-of-context to inject unpredictability in the painting gesture. She has assimilated in her practice an eclectic multilayering process combining pyrography, sanding and detailed stencil compositions on wood. Wabi-sabi -embracing chance- is a central idea in her work, equally so is meticulous control. This results in a subterranean tension that jeopardizes the ethereal appearance of her pieces; arbitrariness and mechanical execution fuse to create what she calls "systèmes faillibles" where spectral motifs seek to emerge out of obscuring lattices. Her work has been exhibited internationally and acquired in private and corporate collections across North America and abroad.