PERISHABLE GESTURES
Evan Nesbit
JANUARY 4 - FEBRUARY 17, 2018
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce Perishable Gestures a solo exhibition of new works by Evan Nesbit on view January 4th through February 17th. The show features a new series of paintings on vinyl made using acrylic and ink jet on perforated vinyl fabric. The exhibition continues the artist's perceptual investigation into texture and material in a performative practice that engages how the body mediates surfaces and the tensions they contain. Please join us on Thursday, January 4th, 5-8pm for an opening reception for the artist.
Nesbit's recent paintings are made using .jpegs printed in UV curable ink on vinyl coated mesh fabric as the site for performatively gestural abstractions. The paintings are organized and executed through the mechanical distribution and registration of pigments onto and through a permeable grid. Working from both sides of the fabric, the artist pushes and drags brightly colored acrylic hues through its voids using his hands and large rubber squeegees. In so doing, Nesbit combines substrate and painted image into one material object which - through the optical mix of paint and support - structures the visual experience of each painting within process, performance and materiality. The result is a series of striking paintings that arouse the tactile, haptic sensibilities of the viewer. Vibrant, textured, meticulously executed visual experiences, the paintings can only be truly seen and comprehended in the real world, standing in their immediate presence.
Nesbit sets up a contradistinctive relationship between the rigid yet permeable structure of the print on vinyl fabric and the physically charged goo of paint pushing through. Ultimately, the resulting works function as paintings by way of their formal re-ordering of material, creating a sense of light and space by foregrounding the texture and material weight of the paint itself. The process creates a textured field of color which shifts in value and tone as light rakes across its surface. These paintings offer a suspended visual exchange that draws focus from the trace of basal gestures marked by the artist's body to the subtle interactions of color and dappled light as they effect both the emergence and dissolution of embedded imagery within each painting.
The paintings cannot help but call to mind the inspired histories of color field painting, gestural abstraction, action painting, Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces, Dansaekhwa, to name a few. But in these organic and haptic paintings, Nesbit creates new possibilities and establishes his own province through which to explore and deepen the discourse of contemporary painting.
Evan Nesbit was born in 1985 and lives and works in Nevada City, California. He holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA) and a MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT), where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize. Nesbit has held solo exhibitions at Van Doren Waxter (New York, NY), James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA), Koki Arts (Tokyo, Japan), Weiss Berlin (Berlin, Germany), Annarumma Gallery (Naples, Italy) and Roberts & Tilton (Culver City, CA). His work has been presented in group exhibitions at Praz-Delavallade (Paris, France), Brand New Gallery (Milan, Italy), Sean Kelly (New York, NY), among others.
For additional information please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.com.