Photo via Racine Art Museum
Dan Devening works
Works by Chicago artist Dan Devening featured in 'Fenestra Falsa' at OS Projects (2026).
Dan Devening’s current exhibition, “Fenestra Falsa,” at OS Projects in Racine (through October 10) continues his decades-long engagement with work at the mongrel intersection of Swiss modernist design, geometric abstraction, collage, and, somehow, in a couple instances, landscape. The exhibition builds from the visual hook of the window-frame proscenium, rounded in many cases like a phone screen or airplane portal, calling into question how we process imagery in the contemporary everything-everywhere-all-at-once world. Devening somehow traffic-cops it all into something cohesive, compelling, relevant, and decidedly man-made.
Fenestra falsa refers to the architectural practice of adding a false window to a structure to shore up its balance or visual integrity. Applied to painting in the age of screen retreat, the concept suggests a certain kind of indirect, or mediated experience that occurs when looking into rather than looking out at content.
Air Studies, one of a dozen or so chest-sized works installed on the east wall of the amply windowed space—which is itself a kind of looking glass—leans on a loose array of marks lurking behind the soft curves of a frame-within-a-frame. The directional profusion of horizontal bands of gray-greens and receding yellows snakes above a bed of neon pink at the bottom, appearing immediately fast and gestural. But the marks quickly grip the crisp perimeter of the frame, securing the composition’s logic and grounding it in intentionality. It’s a David Lynchian display of winking control hiding shrewdly inside a stew of wild and colorful creative energy.
Repetition across the walls continually helps establish the rules of order, but Devening never allows anything resembling a formula take over. Other works in the show flip the script. Chamfered Monument scrambles the program by sending the would-be frame backward and bringing the softened rectangle-motif into the foreground, where it becomes a corporeal object. Nearby, Cracked bricks up the center stage with a formally hefty stack of pale geometric forms, exposing a curious world behind it and emphasizing illusionistic depth. Delft Stack similarly pries open space by effectively superimposing layers, its Prussian Blue puffs of appear as organisms discovered on a plate of agar under a microscope, all brought to life by a macroscopic neon-lime border.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Image and Object
All these odd dashes of spray paint, unexpected color and figure-ground wrestling matches across the dozens of works are complemented wonderfully by two mystifyingly unique paintings on the south wall. Both 48 x 28 inches, Lattice Revel and Trestle Fold jump-cut the show’s narrative into another level of materiality. Each arranges an airport-runway-like configuration of colorful enamel bands against—or perhaps within—a textured monochromatic background, neutral gray in the former and navy blue in the latter, bringing into question what is image and what is object; what is depicted and what is embedded. They’re unicorns, or perhaps Galápagos finches, within the exhibition’s more regulated ecosystem: the same interest in mark, object, and composition, but with modified beaks and shells which derive supplemental magic from the primary world of the show, making the surrounding diversity all the richer.
Devening also includes several sculptural objects derived from a recent CTA project he completed in Chicago, as well as a strand of small colored wood blocks dangling from the ceiling. These dimensional works extend his formal intentions into open space while reinforcing the sense that everything here is part of the same visual project.
While “Fenestra Falsa” stirs implications about windows, mediation, and the culpability of medium and method in an age of artificial and sloppy content, it ultimately insists on moving beyond those questions toward the formal opportunities smuggled in from a paleo-electric world. Devening has found a strong axle around which to wrap his ideas on at OS, but the exhibition quickly moves beyond its conceptual premise into its own retinal joyride. I always say that art’s like a roller coaster, best when it tells the limbic system that control has been lost, only to slip a comforting message to the prefrontal cortex that all is in capable conceptual hands. Devening’s mitts are self-possessed and his eyes seasoned, and together they’ve delivered a thrilling excursion, punctuated by dozens of elegant and economical reminders of the value of time-worn compositional sensitivity.
