Recent graduate of the rigorous, thus prestigious, Yale MFA, painting program, Evan Nesbit's solo show, Jestorial, debuts here at Motus Fort in Tokyo, from September 7 through October 13, 2012.
Gesture in painting not only refers to the brush stroke and form of line, but to also materiality in canvas— including substrate and structure—, paint, application, and display with self-conscious awareness of installation. Less usual varieties of woven fabrics, non-traditional paints, and the purposeful selection of non-rectilinear forms breathe shifting and contradictory pleasure/uncertainty/discomfort/repulsion/ attraction/ surprise… which opens new avenues into the possibility of painting. Inverting paint into support of surface as it pokes through invokes playful jest, while un- right angles slightly askew create unnerving awareness of spatial reality, and highlight personal doubt of experienced perception.
Nesbit explores notions of landscape in Felt, not with the customary horizontal line, but in ham-fisted materiality with a cloud (sky), marijuana leaf symbol (land) on an Afgan blanket (home— personal comfort, time and styles…). In Free Bird, line sneaks off surface and floats aloft. Other works make use of Astroturf, a kitchy ground cover highlighting class issues in landscaping and personal possession. This creates a synthetic repulsive yet seductive allusion to perfection in grass that tangentially refers also to pot, a recurring symbol. Jestorial presents image as process, and method as hijinks. Paint frequently applied beneath the surface and oozes through the surface, while at other times is dyed into the surface or crudely applied onto the surface. In Pacific Hue a painting has been adhered to a dyed, yellow canvas creating a painting over a painting.
Evan Nesbit writes:
I am interested in the porosity and cognitive physicality of vision. I see pattern, color, and material relationships as visual devices that can challenge the pictorial space of painting and my habitual modes of perception. In my work the imbrication of pattern and materiality exist as expansive fragments of experience that create vision. I make jesting visual propositions, decidedly entrenched in the traditions of two-dimensional pictorial space while exploring the multifaceted language and syntax of painting as it relates to my own experiences. I constantly strive to create a level of intellectual uncertainty and spontaneous curiosity in my work. I recognize limitation and often strive for failure in abstraction because it has become more provocative.
