Chris Kahler "Bio-dynamic" catalog

1

ChRis KahleR auGust 31 – octobeR 9, 2010Bio-Dynamic

Front Cover detail:

Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010, 3' x 6'

acrylic and oils on canvas

right:

Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010, 3' x 6'


130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa Fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

ChRis KahleR auGust 31 – octobeR 9, 2010Bio-Dynamic

GalleRy DirectoRs

david eichholtz & richard Barger

3

Back in 1952, the art critic harold rosenberg

coined the term “action Painting” to describe

a sea change that was taking place in ameri-

can art. in his eyes, the most exciting works

being made were not polished products

executed by artists according to carefully laid

out plans, after all the kinks had been ironed

out in preparatory sketches and preliminary

studies. on the contrary, they were wildly

improvised extravaganzas in which anything

could happen, the less expected the better.

this is how rosenberg, in “the american

action Painters” put it: “at a certain moment

the canvas began to appear to one american

painter after another as an arena in which

to act—rather than as a space in which to

reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’

an object, actual or imagined. What was to

go on the canvas was not a picture but an

event.” the action—of making the painting—

is what mattered. the result of that activity—

dried paint on canvas—was only worthy of a

viewer’s attention if it captured the urgency

and uncertainty with which it was done, con-

veying, to viewers, the anxiety, engagement,

and release that accompanied the struggle in

the studio to do something that was not fake

or false, but authentic and real. “apocalyptic

Wallpaper” was rosenberg’s term for action

Painting gone bad: for works in which nothing

was discovered because the artist was stuck

in a rut, churning out formulaic renditions of

his signature style as if the only goal were to

cover the walls with tasteful products.

one of the oddest things about rosenberg’s

articulate defense of abstraction was that

it marked the moment when artists began

to turn away from painting, many going so

far as to declare it dead and many more

turning to assemblage, installation, perfor-

mance, video, photography, and all manner

of hybrids that eventually gave rise to the

polyglot mélange of Postmodernism. Paint-

ing, particularly abstraction, was left out of

the supposedly anything-goes free-for-all

because the objects its actions produced

seemed to get in the way of free-wheeling

activity: too many viewers felt that that

action Painting had become nothing but

apocalyptic Wallpaper.

Chris Kahler’s new paintings bring these

issues to mind because they play fast and

loose—and very intelligently—with the oppo-

sition between action and apocalypse, as well

as between painting and wallpaper, which

have been in the background of discussions

about art for more than a half-century. Born

in 1969, Kahler belongs to a generation of

artists for whom abstract painting was not

intrinsically off-limits, the kiss-of-death for

artists who wanted to be taken seriously by

a critical establishment committed to avant-

garde experimentation and opposed to any-

thing that seemed conservative, middleclass,

unadventuresome. Kahler stands out among

this generation of rebellious, try-anything-

once painters because his works make their

way out of the impasse between authentic

action in the studio and finished painting on

the gallery wall, which drove many artists

and viewers away from painting in the 1960s,

’70s, and ’80s. his works do so by shift-

ing the emphasis away from the artist, his

biography, psychology, and inner sentiments,

FoReveR Nowby David Pagel

leFt detail: Dynamic HybriD c-2

2010, 3' x 6' acrylic on canvas

4

and toward the viewer: his past, present, and

point of view, as well as beliefs, dreams, and

desires; anxieties, conflicts, and concerns. at

the same time that Kahler paints himself out

of the picture to make room for viewers—and

the unpredictable freedoms art sometimes

makes possible—his abstract images of flow-

ing and fusing pigments promiscuously mix

terms that were once unlikely bedfellows.

think of Kahler’s densely packed yet expan-

sively open-ended canvases and panels as

time-release action Paintings. rather than

taking viewers back to a series of self-defin-

ing discoveries made in the studio, his pains-

taking, labor-intensive works demand that

viewers re-make them in the moment, each

and every time that any one of us lays eyes

on them. Kahler’s uncanny abstractions are

particularly difficult to remember, much less

describe. their superabundance of detail,

profusion of unnameable shapes, complexity

of organic forms, multilayered compositions,

whiplash shifts in scale, and electrifying

rainbows of phenomenally nuanced tertiary

colors insure that the more one looks, the

more one sees, and, moreover, that the path

and the pace of one’s trip through any one

of Kahler’s works is never the same twice.

Surprise and discovery are built into his jam-

packed constellations of visual incidents,

which aim for amazement and deliver its

spine-tingling, mind-blowing pleasures with

stunning frequency.

think, also, of Kahler’s supercharged abstrac-

tions as apocalyptic Wallpaper in the Pres-

ent tense. his swirling maelstroms of oil and

acrylic are not the lifeless byproducts or evi-

dentiary records of events that have already

happened in the studio and are, for all intents

and purpose, over and done with. instead,

Kahler’s paintings put the highest priority on

events that have not yet transpired and will

not take place without the active participation

of a viewer, constantly responding to these

stimulating works by making seat-of-the-

pants decisions based in intuition, hunches,

and barely perceived inklings. More dedi-

cated to potential and possibility than past

actions and completed activities, Kahler’s

present-oriented paintings invite and de-

mand face-to-face engagement: scrutiny

that is up close and personal and requires

viewers to reveal as much about themselves

as the works before us. they are apocalyptic

in the sense that if you fail to lose yourself in

them—only to find yourself somewhere else:

renewed, refreshed, redeemed—you lose out

on a valuable opportunity for growth, devel-

opment, and discovery, at a deep, existential

level. Where rosenberg articulated the terms

by which artists could fail (or succeed) in

their works, Kahler does the same for view-

ers, transferring what is at stake in the studio

to the ongoing present that his invigorating

art inhabits. the act of viewing his paintings

is essentially creative, with all the risks and

responsibilities that implies. Kahler’s paint-

ings are far less egocentric than those that

follow old-fashioned models of art-making.

they are also more social, contextual, and

flexible, not to mention unpredictable, open-

ended and moving.

For centuries, artists have sought to stop

time, to make works so powerful, momen-

tous, and all-consuming that they seem

to occupy their own reality—a world unto

themselves, next to which reality pales in

comparison. Kahler takes a different tact.

his art is engineered on the principle of fold-

ing time back on itself, of overlaying vari-

ous moments not so that the past and the

present collapse into an impossibly fulfilling

crescendo that dazzles and dominates, but

5

so that the moment in which they are seen

expands to include an inconceivable number

of moments that preceded it and even more

moments that follow. his technique bears

this out. Kahler’s paintings are multilayered

constellations that allow viewers to catch

fleeting glimpses of layers otherwise cov-

ered over by opaque and semi-translucent

coats of paint. By dripping, splashing, and

pouring brush-loads and buckets of acrylic

and oil atop one another in a single paint-

ing, Kahler sometimes builds upon previous

layers that have dried or are still wet, and at

others obliterates them completely, or trans-

forms them significantly, not really starting

fresh, but starting over, with all the emo-

tional consequences such endeavors imply.

his works do not stop time or freeze it in

single, razor-thin instants—like photographs

or movie stills—but open fleeting moments

to various “befores” and “afters,” increasing

the mystery by acknowledging and cultivat-

ing myriad possibilities.

Kahler’s impressive repertoire of painterly

moves is all about making paintings that

detail: HybriD SuSPenSion

2009, 3' x 4' acrylic and oils on panel

6

get viewers to experience them as paintings

within paintings within paintings, and so on,

and on, and on. another way to put it is that

his art allows us to experience singularities

as multiplicities, transforming resolved com-

positions and autonomous wholes into open-

ended journeys with no ends in sight. Some

of his works are hallucinatory, while avoid-

ing the narrative sentimentality typical of

standard Surrealism. imagine what the world

would look like if the Ben-day dots of Pop art

were on acid, everything melting and mutat-

ing, gorgeous and terrifying, depending on

the tenor of the trip. others embody a potent

and corrosive beauty, a sublime combination

of breakdown and growth, disintegration

and accumulation, creation and destruction.

think software viruses gone organic, or the

birth of techno-bacteria. this gives you an

idea of the uncategorizable mutations that

take place in Kahler’s wild hybrids and rogue

mongrels. Sometimes it seems as if he paints

pictures of a world of effervescence, in which

solid substances dissolve into roiling gases,

steamy atmospheres, and gravity-defying liq-

uid clouds. in his work, it is almost impossible

detail: Dynamic HybriD c-6

2010, 24" x 30" acrylic on panel

7

to distinguish between the microscopic and

the cosmic, and everything is richer for the

confusion. Many of Kahler’s paintings appear

to give shape to digital ruins or to electronic

impulses that have eroded, their crisp clarity

fogged over and their streamlined swiftness

encrusted with integrity-compromising impu-

rities. as an artist, Kahler makes a virtue of

glitches in the ordinarily seamless transmis-

sion of digital information, throwing a mon-

key wrench into the machinery that makes

instantaneous communication possible while

upsetting expectations of instantaneous grat-

ification. information overload never looked

better, especially in the paintings that appear

to be solar systems overcrowded with plan-

ets, their orbits impossible because of inter-

planetary traffic jams.

despite the worlds-within-worlds-within-

worlds density of Kahler’s physically resplen-

dent paintings, they do not diminish accord-

ing to the logic of infinite regression. instead,

his complex orchestrations of color, shape,

and texture maintain focus, clarity, and crisp-

ness, their vivid components colliding and

colluding with one another as they create jar-

ring, collage-style disjunctions and animated

compositional rhythms. the centrifugal and

centripetal forces at work in Kahler’s images

generate mental conundrums that enliven the

mind as a viewer strives to put together the

seemingly shattered fragments, to discover,

amid the compelling chaos, an improvised

cartography or ad hoc archaeology.

the secret ingredient that allows Kahler to

shift his paintings into high gear, so that they

seem to move at warp speed, is masking

fluid, an acrylic medium he applies like paint

and then, long after it has dried, peels off,

like masking tape. Between the application

of the masking fluid and its removal, Kahler

applies one or more layers of paint, pouring,

dripping, and blending freely. When he tears

off the masking material, a previously buried

layer of the painting is once again visible.

the past, which had vanished, comes back.

Kahler repeats this step many times in a

single painting, creating a labyrinth in time

and space. the colors he uses add to the un-

certainty about which part preceded which:

brighter tints leap forward, darker ones re-

cede, no matter which step in the sequence

they belong to. this further complicates the

temporal relationship between and among

layers, adding figure-ground ambiguity to

the mix. this makes Kahler a stranger in his

own painting, which allows him to get out of

his comfort zone, to steer clear of facility and

virtuosity and the formulaic cranking out

of what rosenberg would call apocalyptic

Wallpaper. Constantly responding to an

ongoing accumulation of marks, drips, and

spills, Kahler creates largely unanticipated

and wonderfully improvised palimpsests

that open onto endless possibilities.

viewing his paintings takes time. it is an

activity that cannot be done quickly. all of

Kahler’s works have the dazzling, knock-

your-socks-off impact of images unafraid

to compete with everything out there, will-

ing and able to hold their own in the image

glut of modern life, whose capacity for swal-

lowing up subtlety, nuance, and delicacy is

well known and relentlessness. this is where

Kahler’s art works its magic, bringing the de-

liciousness of details, the subtlety of sensual-

ity, the mysteriousness of the unknown, and

the beauty of ordinarily overlooked incidents

to the forefront, where viewers are invited to

savor them and to share them, over and over

again, and never the same way twice.

8

BeloW: Duality a-1, 2010

diptych 6' x 8' (each half 6' x 4')


9

detail: Duality a-1, 2010

diptych 6' x 8' (each half 6' x 4')


10

Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010

3' x 6' acrylic on canvas

detail: Dynamic HybriD a-1, 2009

6' x 8' acrylic and oils on canvas

11

Dynamic HybriD c-6

2010, 24" x 30"

acrylic on panel

Dynamic HybriD c-8

2010, 24" x 30"

acrylic on panel

Dynamic HybriD a-1

2009, 6' x 8'


12

biotectonica, 2010


14



15







16

HybriD a-1, 2010


17

detail: HybriD a-1, 2010


18

rHomb b-1, 2010

24" x 24"


rHomb b-2, 2010

24" x 24"


Dynamic HybriD a-3

2009, 4' x 5'

acrylic on canvas

19

detail: Dynamic HybriD a-3


20

detail: rHomb c-8

2010, 30" x 30"

acrylic and oils on panel

21

rHomb c-3, 2010

30" x 30"

acrylic on panel

rHomb c-8, 2010

30" x 30"


rHomb c-6, 2010

30" x 30"

acrylic on panel

rHomb c-9, 2010

30" x 30"


22

HybriD SuSPenSion

2009, 3' x 4'


Dynamic HybriD c-13

2010, 2' x 3'

acrylic on panel

Dynamic HybriD c-4

2010, 3' x 4'

acrylic on panel

Dynamic HybriD c-5

2010, 2' x 3'

acrylic on canvas

23


2010, 3' x 4' acrylic on panel

24 Chris Kahler received his BFa at ohio

Wesleyan University in 1991. Within his junior

year of college, he spent a semester abroad

at Parson's School of art and design and

the american University in Paris, France. he

then went on for an Ma at eastern illinois

University in 1992 and an MFa from north-

western University in 1995 where he studied

with ed Paschke, James valerio and William

Conger. he has been teaching at eastern

illinois University since 1999, where he is a

full Professor, graduate Coordinator and

head of the Painting area.

Since 2002, Kahler has had six solo exhibi-

tions in Chicago and St. louis and numerous

thematic exhibitions throughout the coun-

try. recent exhibitions include Synchronous

events- the Works of chris Kahler and charles

Schwall at Purdue University, new Paintings,

il+mo at the edwardsville art Center, Paper

now at i-Space gallery in Chicago, biennial

24 at the South Bend regional art Museum,

le Papier at gescheidle gallery and the (in)

Visible body at niU gallery in Chicago.

Kahler has been awarded numerous honors

including residencies at Painting’s edge res-

idency in idyllwild, Ca and two artist grants

for the vermont Studio Center. his work has

been reviewed and profiled in various art

magazines and newspapers. the most recent

include art in america (Feb 2010), reviews

in the St. louis Post-dispatch (2009) and

numerous reviews in St. louis ranging from

the West end Word to the riverfront times.

recent catalogue essays include: James

Yood for Hybrid Dynamic and Joe houston

for Viral.

his work can be found in various public

and private collections including the daum

Museum, Cortex Building in St. louis, Wash-

ington University School of Medicine in

St. louis, Bradley University and numerous

private collections.

ChRis KahleR

2525BaCK Cover detail:

Dynamic HybriD c-1

2010, 3' x 6'


Photo CreditS:

richard Sprengeler and

Chris Kahler: Paintings

Yuki Kahler:

Portrait of Chris Kahler

26

iSBn 978-0-9827872-2-9

PriCe $10.00

130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa Fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

Chris Kahler "Bio-dynamic" catalog

Documents

Transcript of Chris Kahler "Bio-dynamic" catalog