Thomas Gentille: Twenty-First Century

Artist list

Thomas Gentille

For over fifty years, Thomas Gentille has re-imagined the possibilities of jewelry as a medium of artistic expression. He has invented new techniques, explored alternative materials and created works that are both minimal and poetic. Gentille’s use of unusual substances, ranging from eggshell to dental amalgam, has focused on manifesting the “soul” of each material as an integral quality in a finished piece.
Informed by modernism, Gentille’s work is often strongly geometric and sculptural. At the same time, he subtly employs color, texture and controlled accident with exquisite craftsmanship. The results are bold pieces of abstract art that command attention, while maintaining a sense of mystery and philosophical calm.
The exhibition will feature over thirty-five of Gentille’s pins, created in a wide range of forms and materials, including wood, plastic laminate, resin and stone. Nine pins in the shape of slanting trapezoids have an eggshell surface, comprised of thousands of tiny fragments arranged by the artist. This ancient technique rediscovered by Gentille uses bits of hen’s egg, and suggests the fractured surface of an abstract painting. Gentille brings the sides of his pieces into play, here with contrasting colors. As in a number of the pins, the back is also part of the piece, known to the wearer but hidden from the viewer. The reverse of an ivory piece is a clear window holding crushed black marcasite.

A number of Gentille’s pins display an architectonic sensibility, with the engineering becoming a strong visual presence. A vertical piece in cherry and plywood reveals its inner structure, which supports the rectangular forms, including one cantilevered element. Similarly, Gentille creates a pin with a grid of squares, one of which hangs off into space, using pumice and paint layered with translucent plastic.
Gentille has explored the contrast of the natural and unpredictable with the synthetic and controlled in many of works on display. A pin with a field of vertical streaks in warm yellow resin ends with a reservoir of granules of dyed gray cork. A horizontal piece has an archipelago of tiny beach stones and garnet pebbles emerging from white resin. A cedar pin has been wire-brushed to expose the deep grooves of the grain, and then a rectangular section has been treated with black resin.