Miles Debas “Blind Spot”

Arts + Leisure

[Image: Miles Debas "I Look up to U" (2019) ink, acrylic, collage on muslin, 32 x 24 in.]

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Arts+Leisure presents Blind Spot, our debut exhibition of paintings by Miles Debas. Incorporating elements of collage, and shaped and unconventional supports, the works on display reflect a deep engagement with Modernist traditions. Cubism and Fauvism are refracted through the artist’s more contemporary handling of form and space. Debas deftly glides from figuration and narrative to abstract studies of space and color. These are underscored by a quality of painterly fluidity that unites the paintings in the exhibition. Working with a variety of materials including ink, acrylic paint, and muslin, Debas draws out richly textured, highly corporeal surfaces and hues that are at once luminous and restrained.

The breadth of Debas’ eclecticism is itself striking, encompassing glimpses of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, along with the work of later artists such as Sigmar Polke and others associated with Neo-Expressionism, this is especially clear in the compositions of Bricklayers and Runners. Though these influences are undoubtedly integral to Debas’ practice, they appear as leitmotifs rather than overarching themes. His use of ink and muslin lends an informal, fresh character, displacing the heft of the traditions he invokes.

Several of the works in Blind Spot present open-ended, multi-tiered formulations of space; in Eerie Avenue Vision and Flying Horses, variations in scale and perspective create ambiguous, dreamlike vistas charged with potential energy. In It Isn’t Adding Up, offset layers of ink and acrylic paint create a shifting, fluctuating image, disrupting the viewer’s perceptions of foreground and background points. Double Painter, Small Planet, and Bricklayers explore symmetry and repeating spatial constructions. In Double Painter, the body of the eponymous painter is doubled horizontally and duplicated, following the bounds of the bordering triangular patterns. Small World and Bricklayers preset microcosmic visions of routine, similarly organized along a stylized geometric framework. Laying bare the seams of his paintings and mixed-media works (by exposing patches of burlap and jute, etc.), Debas invites the viewer into his process, an atelier-like approach that mirrors the spirit of his appropriation of earlier movements.

Miles Debas was born in 1985 in Paris, France and is currently based in NYC. He received a B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College in 2007. Debas has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe in both solo and group exhibitions at Asterisk Projects, 205 Hudson, Beers Gallery, and Freight+Volume Gallery, among others.