Darren Waterston: Eventide
Darren Waterston, Morpheus no. 5, 2018. Watercolor on rag paper, 14 x 10 inches
Inman Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Darren Waterston, Eventide. Opening with an artist’s reception from 6–8pm on Friday, January 2, the exhibition will be on view through February 23, 2018.
Channeling the specters and emotions that permeate landscape, Waterston’s new paintings create an unsteady and tenuous world. He paints dream-states and twilight, the moments at which daylight and darkness touch. “Eventide suggests the liminal in-between states both in dreams and twilight. Gossamer shapes and shadows emerge; playful chimera, phantoms and ghost-like forms occupy watery landscapes and celestial realms,” Waterston writes. “The paintings often juxtapose fastidiously painted representation up against loose, viscous gestures, stains, and abrasions.”
Waterston is meticulous in his materials, using techniques which reference early panel painting. His surfaces are built up through an accumulation of various viscous painting mediums, gesso made from marble dust, and rabbit skin glue. Painted on wood, these deliciously layered surfaces become mysterious and waxy, refracting light in a distinctive manner, and creating an evocative depth of field. The paintings wander between landscape and abstraction, mountain ranges dissolving into sky. Waterston’s paintings delve into a liminal world, finding a poetic space between light and shadow.
“A lot of the shapes in these paintings came from looking at forms that were ghostlike or phantomlike,” he says. “I didn’t want to be telling ghost stories, but I wanted to try and materialize the invisible, to ask what the invisible looks like. I wanted to work with a visual vocabulary that can animate a sense of space, filled with vespers and other life forms.” He cites the Japanese term Obake, often mis-translated as “ghost.” Instead of being a human spirit, the Obake are preternatural energies, sometimes understood as the spirits of stone, mountains, or wind. Literally translated, the term means, “a thing that changes,” and so in Waterston’s paintings, we see a series of mutations and transformations between familiar landscape elements—a bird, a mountain, a tree, a pebble, a branch—and ephemeral, shapeshifting forms.
Indeed, the artist is, himself, in a period of transformation: in February, he moved from Manhattan to upstate New York, making his home and studio in the Hudson River Valley, and this is the first body of paintings he has made there. “My studio is a big glass space that faces gardens, wooded areas, trees, a pond,” he says, “and I have been working in a small, dark studio for years… It’s not that I’m painting that landscape, but I’m much more observant about change of colors and light. I feel a more holistic way of making art – everything is more integrated in a way I haven’t experienced in a very long time.”
Much of Waterston’s previous works have looked to specific movements and references from art history—his immersive installation at the Freer | Sackler in Washington, D.C., for example, reimagined and demolished James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room. In these new paintings, though, Waterston is leaving his references more open-ended and fluid. He’s working with a new vocabulary, in a new landscape. The paintings on panel are joined by 20 paintings on paper, all in process at the same time. “There’s a kind of call and response between the works as I’m painting,” he says. “It’s much more symphonic, that is, each piece has a job to do that is very distinctive.” Seen together, they make a destabilized world, elegantly resisting the drive to find logic and order in our visual worlds. For two months last year, he started every day with a close reading of a John Ashberry poem. Those poems, “take you to a place, disorienting and illogical, but with a bounty of details, emotionally complex and untethered... I aspire to paint in those realms.”