ART CITIES:Berlin-Nathan Hylden

Nathan Hylden creates paintings, installations, and works on paper using screen print, collage, acrylic, and spray paint. Hylden’s conceptual, yet lush, nearly-abstract group of paintings are like test strips for methods of effacement, the brush-work of brushing-off. Gesture becomes something closer to algorithm, and process closer to script.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Konig Galerie Archive

For his solo exhibition “For Goes On”, Nathan Hylden has grouped three, related sets of paintings, in which a recursive condition of duplication and splicing exists within and without the canvas. One series, of the three presented and interspersed with one at the gallery, was produced as follows: Hylden laid two canvasses side -by -side, and coated both with surgy, metallic, opalescent strokes using a large, self-made brush. The left-hand canvas was then superimposed over the right-hand canvas, after which the artist coated both with spray paint. Like a code or loop, the dark bars mark one canvas’s imprint on the other. The result evokes the atmospheric cancellation of a solar eclipse, but also the scanning bars of a roll of film, or even a censor bar – all forms where nature and machine edit themselves. For the second group of works presented here, the digital is not a condition for production, but a kind of excluded middle. For these, Hylden repeated the mechanical process of superimposition and self-encoding, albeit after identifying the colors used in the first, rosier series and utilizing the inverse color scheme. Added to superimposition, then, is an axis where the painting manipulates or tricks itself anew. The light bulb in Hylden’s light bulb paintings are the only captured, or trapped, images in the exhibition. But is there, perhaps, not the cancelling import of a memento mori in some of the light bulbs? They could be skulls. The glass cranium removed, and hence the optical illusion, and ocular rift, of an eyeball, stripped bare to the pure scaffolding of the socket, which is another word for canvas.

Info: Konig Galerie, St. Agnes, Alexandrinenstr. 118–121, Berlin, Duration: 14/11/15-24/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.koeniggalerie.com