NYAB Event - Liam Everett "Cura"

Liam Everett "Cura"

Paul Kasmin Gallery

This event has ended.

Paul Kasmin Gallery Project space, in collaboration with Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, presents a solo exhibition by the New York artist Liam Everett. Everett’s installation Cura consists of a recent group of paintings, which the artist refers to as the “eclipse paintings.”

Working with acrylic, salt and alcohol, Everett’s paintings both “record and arrest a seemingly alchemical process” and reflect his continued exploration of the perceptual experience. Focusing on the motion of light and its inherent ambiguity as an entity tied, inseparably, to our temporal reality, Everett establishes an immediate, hyper-present relationship with the now. “The eclipse paintings engage the appearance of light rather than the image of light.”

Working with a spare palette of whites, grays and blacks, with hints of underlying color, Everett’s paintings exist at the interstice between deliberate and provisional - at once form-full and formless, finished and unfinished. Everett structures his practice so as to limit the options, the decisions and aesthetic quandaries; neither the form nor the content interests Everett. Rather, Everett’s interest lies in the practice and experience involved in the displacement of both light and subject. The majority of the marks are made with clothes, sandpaper, a trowel and sticks. Layers of paint are deliberately applied, only to be stripped off with salt and alcohol. The emphasis shifts from the object to the experiential struggle itself, the finished paintings being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue of the actual work, “an excuse or vehicle to move between points A and B…The focus is to move between or back and forth, running over the same ground until its time to exit.”

Ultimately, the paintings, not obliged to communicate, express or invoke, become fields in which it is possible for the viewer to see, experience, and penetrate. A series of ‘folds’ which collapse into a space that is experiential rather than communicative. “Perhaps the painting grows its best roots when it sits still and does nothing and speaks of ‘no-thing’.”

"The object is no longer covered by reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and other objects: it seems subtly illuminated from within, light emanates from it, and the result is an impression of solidity and material substance"- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Liam Everett currently lives and works in San Francisco. Everett spent the past 10 years based New York. His work has been exhibited at White Columns, 303 Gallery and Canada Gallery in NYC. He has exhibited internationally in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Also known for his performance-based work Everett performed a piece at ArtBasel 2009, entitled "On The Wall", it was also performed at 179 Canal St. Everett has participated as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, USA, Ateliers de la Ville, L’Union, France, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany and Astérides, Ateliers d'Artistes Friche Belle-de-Mai, Marseille, France. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Romer Young Gallery in May 2011, as well as group shows at the Wattis Contemporary Art Center and White Columns.

[Image: Liam Everett "Untitled" (2011) acrylic, salt and alcohol on panel 24 x 18 in.]