NYAB Event - David Deutsch “Nothing Real”

David Deutsch “Nothing Real”

Southfirst

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The acrylic-on-linen paintings are created with a monotype transfer process. The work itself has the hazy distance of memory: pink and tanned figures, boxy station wagons and West coast driveways predominate.

“This violently ecstatic work depicts figurative vignettes surrounded by fields of wild brushwork. The paintings have the energy of gestural abstraction but an emotional presence that is personal and immersed in memory. Men, tensely paired or single, inhabit charged moments of regard. The images are elegies to need and union.

Deutsch has long utilized contemporary industrial materials for rigorous aesthetic ends. Recently he has painted with acrylic on plastic sheeting, then transferred the choice images to linen, retaining the velocity of pigment applied to a slick material. The folds of the plastic and scratched paint add layers of physicality to the storms of hot dull SoCal color.

Deutsch’s ‘pictures generation’ contemporaries flipped received images into high-energy aesthetic contexts. In the last two decades, Deutsch’s rotunda paintings and eagle-eyed house photographs employed an Olympian distance. His new works, from a bit closer vantage but with a wider view, plunge us into intimate tableaux. These images are elegantly made and brutally seen.”