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"H-8." 72" x 56" Oil on canvas,
baby.
I'm on a Plain By Kelly
Eginton
Between Heaven and Hell
is, what? Earth? I guess technically, the question isn't what,
but where. This is the question that kept coming up in my head
while looking at Jason Byers's paintings of vividly rendered objects
parked in a white desert of ... what ... I don't know. Where the
hell is that thing?
A beltbuckle, a bicycle, a bottle of beer. Carefully
executed oil paintings; casual subject matter. But, like I said,
its not so much the what as the where; the quality of the white
background that contains the objects. It's not a stark or virginal
white. It is at once, warm, rich and flat, like a thought bubble.
It has volume enough to contain, while remaining flat enough to
resist. The object is somewhere, not here or there, but definitely
somewhere. It is held, outlined in black, in a kind of suspended
animation, a state of potential. The thing pops up in your mind
later, detailed, yet generic.
Byers's work seems to reside precariously in
the no-man's land between reading and looking, thinking and feeling.
Yeah, the rendering is meticulous. It's cool. It is done carefully,
lovingly in a Dick and Jane illustration style that tells me I
am reading; maybe I'm supposed to be learning something. But the
red on that deformed lollypop is giving me some strange vibrations
... and what about that thing in the picture? Do you want it?
Do you want it bad?
Looking at a work of art and trying to read
it (or worse, read into it) are two distinctly different activities.
As the word implies, looking is a more passive endeavor, allowing
things to reveal themselves to you, rather than trying to make
it all come together and make sense, so you can move on to the
next thing. Sometimes it requires a bit of patience. Fortunately,
Byers believes in instant gratification. In other words, there's
a big payoff for looking, even just glancing. It's seductive.
A vintage red bicycle, a yellow cocktail umbrella,
a hamburger, a puffy baseball hat. I consider each painting, each
object individually. I am compelled to try to understand all of
the objects together, as a group of something more specific than
just "things." The sum of these items conjures up a sense of belonging
to the local subculture, other young artists, and people my age,
I think. A bitchin' bike, a lowbrow/high fashion statement (puffy
baseball hat), drinking paraphernalia ... Maybe these are all
things that Byers just thinks are kinda neat; things that would
look funny painted really big.
There's a certain freedom that comes from saying,
"Fuck it, this is what I want to look at. I'm gonna paint my favorite
baseball hat."
Moreover, he has found a way to impart a mythology
of himself as an artist, without making him-self the center of
attention in that creepy Jackson Pollocky sort of way. A restrained,
or seemingly scientific approach of considering the world around
him makes it comfortable to be personal. But then, this is nothing
new for Byers, who recorded an entire album of songs he wrote,
produced and performed while he traveled across the United Sates
in a 12 foot travel trailer, living out his own myth as a folk
singer. And get this, the album was called, Nowhere in Between
....
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