NY ARTS: May/June Picks, 2006
And now a few words about the Pick of the month: American painter Edward Evans’ exhibition at China Gallery this winter on 57th Street was unique and remarkable for several reasons: Visually, the work is stunning. The degree of illusion he achieves through his mastery of airbrush techniques is unlike anything I have seen. Airbrush has always been sneered at by fine artists as being a tool for lowly illustration. Score one for Evans for using it anyway to invent a style both lush and stark. Nowadays, with digital manipulations rampant, there are no tricks disallowed anyway, but he has been painting with airbrush for 25, maybe 30 years. His subject is Chinese text. He writes about his mental processes involved in the art making; uses a computer to translate from English into Chinese; and creates optically baffling renderings of the texts seemingly inscribed into (rather than onto) fluttering or crumpled tablets, papers or cloth. He invents the imagery purely from his imagination. And conceptually, it is most intriguing that he is not at all interested in calligraphy. The characters are copied from the rigid mechanical fonts of his translation program. These ironies create layers of contradicting ingenuity that adds up to more than meets the eye. The work was exhibited alongside ancient Asian ceramic sculptures. This extreme juxtaposition highlights the meticulous craftsmanship involved in creating these historical treasures as well as the care Edward Evans takes in patiently following his own singular path throughout art history.
Many times the art of Edward Evans has been considered illusionistic and hyper-realistic. I believe these two adjectives distort his work. On the contrary I believe his poetic is one of a new materiality in which there is space for man and his inner life. Every painting is the materialization of an emotion, of an inner state of mind. It is always a reality not only filtered by perception, but also and above all by memory, by time. Time plays a fundamental role in his poetic. Indeed, all the surfaces and objects represented are sodden with temporality… and of writing, of long texts and inscriptions that have miraculously survived the fury of time. Evans’ writings seem to free themselves from a linguistic-cognitive plane to a new symbolic dimension. His taste for hyper-realism and for particulars is evidenced in the extreme rigor with which he represents the world, bit by bit,… with emotions and tensions. It is an art of memory and of evidence.
LOCAL FLAIR, June & July, 2009
Evans’ astoundingly dimensional-looking paintings are all two dimensional acrylic on linen, that get their depth from a combination of both traditional painting techniques and spray paint. “Spraying paint with an airbrush enables me to achieve smooth color transitions which result in spatial and surface illusions that are convincing from even close up” explains Evans. “Plains” [which was inspired by the big skies and wide breath-taking sunsets of Minnesota] is a compelling example of the way that Evans combines the illusion and chiaroscuro of the old masters with the spontaneity and drama of the abstract expressionists.