Evan Nesbit “Cellophane Grip”

Van Doren Waxter

[Image: Evan Nesbit "Manifold Painting (Primary Colors)" (2017) Acrylic and inkjet print on vinyl 62 x 46 in.]

This event has ended.

Van Doren Waxter presents Evan Nesbit: Cellophane Grip, a solo exhibition of new works by Evan Nesbit. The show features four acrylic-on-burlap paintings from Nesbit’s Porosity series, as well as six paintings from his Manifold series made using acrylic and ink jet on perforated vinyl fabric. Presenting these two bodies of work together for the first time, the exhibition explores the artist’s investigation into texture and material in a practice that engages how the body mediates surfaces and the tensions they contain. Accompanying the show is a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Alex Bacon.

Both series are ongoing projects for Nesbit, reflecting his resistance of monoscopic modes of perspective and appeal to an embodied sense of vision. In Nesbit’s Porosity paintings, he squeegees vibrant acrylic paint through the verso of dyed burlap, which is cut into irregular pieces and re-sewn into dynamic grid-like compositions. As he pushes the paint through the pores of the fabric, swaths of tactile protrusions emerge out of the substrate in a chiastic reordering of elements. Variations in both the density of the acrylic and the intensity of pressure in which it is applied create subtle shifts in three-dimensional texture. Nesbit’s Porosity series pulsates with tactile energy.

Building off of the set of concerns established in his Porosity series, Nesbit’s Manifold paintings are similarly made by manipulating acrylic paint through the backside of vinyl screen prints. Whereas in Porosity the paint is distributed in a more ubiquitous, expressive fashion, in Manifold it is applied in a controlled and mechanical manner that isolates and masks particular regions of the photographic image, employing a more chromatically varied palette. Compressing and collapsing pictorial space and material presence into one surface, Nesbit’s Manifold paintings comprise a suite of dense, haptic images that promotes multiplicitous ways of viewing.

Nesbit’s practice references the Capitalist Realism of Sigmar Polke; the Gutai works of Kazuo Shiraga and Shozo Shimamoto; the Arte Povera of Alberto Burri; Supports/Surfaces artists André-Pierre Arnal and Patrick Saytour; as well as the Neo-Geometric Conceptualism of his former Yale professor Peter Halley.