Kyle Staver “Tout Court”

Half Gallery

This event has ended.

Kyle Staver builds worlds. Inside, we are close to nature. The light feels familiar but just out of reach. Scenes unfold inside darkening forests and drooping wisteria. I look up to see the skies of Northern Minnesota. I look down and notice Artemis and Mr. Moose participating in their own stories. I look around and am surrounded by fireflies and moths. A chorus of animals bear witness.

These paintings are made from scratch. Brush strokes gather, stretch out, zigzag, and crisscross giving shape to clouds, waves, feathers and fishnet stockings. Oil sticks jab onto stretched canvas making dots that turn into eyes. An elk, a horse, or an archer, make eye contact. Who am I in this world of dancing satyrs and barking dogs?

Touch is something that is felt, suggested, inferred in Kyle’s paintings. Objects and voids play with nearness, always dancing and reshaping the space around each other. Two lovers’ faces almost meet. Between kisses, their lips pause. In a darkened field, leering eyes and smoking cigars come within a hair’s breadth tracing the contours of a dancer in the dark. Somewhere else a bird lands on a hand.

And then there’s the visual rhyming. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. A glowing bulb pushes back an arcing net. Crows circle against circling clouds. Seven dolphins dive synchronously against an outstretched orange line of last light, high on the horizon.

And to see all of this, to feel all of this, requires time.

Kyle takes us into the time of myths and memories to show us what still matters. And by asking us to trace her painted marks she holds our hand as we witness a world come into being.

March 28, 2022
Sangram Majumdar