chris kahler "bio-dynamic" catalog
DESCRIPTION
Bio-Dynamic, a solo exhibition of paintings by Chris Kahler. Bio-Dynamic is potent and colorful; more cellular and molecular than astral. However, Kahler blurs the boundaries and moves between micro and macro, leaving the viewer wondering if this work is portraying the beginning or end with the themes of transformation, mutation and system conflict.TRANSCRIPT
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ChRis KahleR auGust 31 – octobeR 9, 2010Bio-Dynamic
Front Cover detail:
Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010, 3' x 6'
acrylic and oils on canvas
right:
Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010, 3' x 6'
acrylic and oils on canvas
130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa Fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]
ChRis KahleR auGust 31 – octobeR 9, 2010Bio-Dynamic
GalleRy DirectoRs
david eichholtz & richard Barger
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Back in 1952, the art critic harold rosenberg
coined the term “action Painting” to describe
a sea change that was taking place in ameri-
can art. in his eyes, the most exciting works
being made were not polished products
executed by artists according to carefully laid
out plans, after all the kinks had been ironed
out in preparatory sketches and preliminary
studies. on the contrary, they were wildly
improvised extravaganzas in which anything
could happen, the less expected the better.
this is how rosenberg, in “the american
action Painters” put it: “at a certain moment
the canvas began to appear to one american
painter after another as an arena in which
to act—rather than as a space in which to
reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’
an object, actual or imagined. What was to
go on the canvas was not a picture but an
event.” the action—of making the painting—
is what mattered. the result of that activity—
dried paint on canvas—was only worthy of a
viewer’s attention if it captured the urgency
and uncertainty with which it was done, con-
veying, to viewers, the anxiety, engagement,
and release that accompanied the struggle in
the studio to do something that was not fake
or false, but authentic and real. “apocalyptic
Wallpaper” was rosenberg’s term for action
Painting gone bad: for works in which nothing
was discovered because the artist was stuck
in a rut, churning out formulaic renditions of
his signature style as if the only goal were to
cover the walls with tasteful products.
one of the oddest things about rosenberg’s
articulate defense of abstraction was that
it marked the moment when artists began
to turn away from painting, many going so
far as to declare it dead and many more
turning to assemblage, installation, perfor-
mance, video, photography, and all manner
of hybrids that eventually gave rise to the
polyglot mélange of Postmodernism. Paint-
ing, particularly abstraction, was left out of
the supposedly anything-goes free-for-all
because the objects its actions produced
seemed to get in the way of free-wheeling
activity: too many viewers felt that that
action Painting had become nothing but
apocalyptic Wallpaper.
Chris Kahler’s new paintings bring these
issues to mind because they play fast and
loose—and very intelligently—with the oppo-
sition between action and apocalypse, as well
as between painting and wallpaper, which
have been in the background of discussions
about art for more than a half-century. Born
in 1969, Kahler belongs to a generation of
artists for whom abstract painting was not
intrinsically off-limits, the kiss-of-death for
artists who wanted to be taken seriously by
a critical establishment committed to avant-
garde experimentation and opposed to any-
thing that seemed conservative, middleclass,
unadventuresome. Kahler stands out among
this generation of rebellious, try-anything-
once painters because his works make their
way out of the impasse between authentic
action in the studio and finished painting on
the gallery wall, which drove many artists
and viewers away from painting in the 1960s,
’70s, and ’80s. his works do so by shift-
ing the emphasis away from the artist, his
biography, psychology, and inner sentiments,
FoReveR Nowby David Pagel
leFt detail: Dynamic HybriD c-2
2010, 3' x 6' acrylic on canvas
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and toward the viewer: his past, present, and
point of view, as well as beliefs, dreams, and
desires; anxieties, conflicts, and concerns. at
the same time that Kahler paints himself out
of the picture to make room for viewers—and
the unpredictable freedoms art sometimes
makes possible—his abstract images of flow-
ing and fusing pigments promiscuously mix
terms that were once unlikely bedfellows.
think of Kahler’s densely packed yet expan-
sively open-ended canvases and panels as
time-release action Paintings. rather than
taking viewers back to a series of self-defin-
ing discoveries made in the studio, his pains-
taking, labor-intensive works demand that
viewers re-make them in the moment, each
and every time that any one of us lays eyes
on them. Kahler’s uncanny abstractions are
particularly difficult to remember, much less
describe. their superabundance of detail,
profusion of unnameable shapes, complexity
of organic forms, multilayered compositions,
whiplash shifts in scale, and electrifying
rainbows of phenomenally nuanced tertiary
colors insure that the more one looks, the
more one sees, and, moreover, that the path
and the pace of one’s trip through any one
of Kahler’s works is never the same twice.
Surprise and discovery are built into his jam-
packed constellations of visual incidents,
which aim for amazement and deliver its
spine-tingling, mind-blowing pleasures with
stunning frequency.
think, also, of Kahler’s supercharged abstrac-
tions as apocalyptic Wallpaper in the Pres-
ent tense. his swirling maelstroms of oil and
acrylic are not the lifeless byproducts or evi-
dentiary records of events that have already
happened in the studio and are, for all intents
and purpose, over and done with. instead,
Kahler’s paintings put the highest priority on
events that have not yet transpired and will
not take place without the active participation
of a viewer, constantly responding to these
stimulating works by making seat-of-the-
pants decisions based in intuition, hunches,
and barely perceived inklings. More dedi-
cated to potential and possibility than past
actions and completed activities, Kahler’s
present-oriented paintings invite and de-
mand face-to-face engagement: scrutiny
that is up close and personal and requires
viewers to reveal as much about themselves
as the works before us. they are apocalyptic
in the sense that if you fail to lose yourself in
them—only to find yourself somewhere else:
renewed, refreshed, redeemed—you lose out
on a valuable opportunity for growth, devel-
opment, and discovery, at a deep, existential
level. Where rosenberg articulated the terms
by which artists could fail (or succeed) in
their works, Kahler does the same for view-
ers, transferring what is at stake in the studio
to the ongoing present that his invigorating
art inhabits. the act of viewing his paintings
is essentially creative, with all the risks and
responsibilities that implies. Kahler’s paint-
ings are far less egocentric than those that
follow old-fashioned models of art-making.
they are also more social, contextual, and
flexible, not to mention unpredictable, open-
ended and moving.
For centuries, artists have sought to stop
time, to make works so powerful, momen-
tous, and all-consuming that they seem
to occupy their own reality—a world unto
themselves, next to which reality pales in
comparison. Kahler takes a different tact.
his art is engineered on the principle of fold-
ing time back on itself, of overlaying vari-
ous moments not so that the past and the
present collapse into an impossibly fulfilling
crescendo that dazzles and dominates, but
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so that the moment in which they are seen
expands to include an inconceivable number
of moments that preceded it and even more
moments that follow. his technique bears
this out. Kahler’s paintings are multilayered
constellations that allow viewers to catch
fleeting glimpses of layers otherwise cov-
ered over by opaque and semi-translucent
coats of paint. By dripping, splashing, and
pouring brush-loads and buckets of acrylic
and oil atop one another in a single paint-
ing, Kahler sometimes builds upon previous
layers that have dried or are still wet, and at
others obliterates them completely, or trans-
forms them significantly, not really starting
fresh, but starting over, with all the emo-
tional consequences such endeavors imply.
his works do not stop time or freeze it in
single, razor-thin instants—like photographs
or movie stills—but open fleeting moments
to various “befores” and “afters,” increasing
the mystery by acknowledging and cultivat-
ing myriad possibilities.
Kahler’s impressive repertoire of painterly
moves is all about making paintings that
detail: HybriD SuSPenSion
2009, 3' x 4' acrylic and oils on panel
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get viewers to experience them as paintings
within paintings within paintings, and so on,
and on, and on. another way to put it is that
his art allows us to experience singularities
as multiplicities, transforming resolved com-
positions and autonomous wholes into open-
ended journeys with no ends in sight. Some
of his works are hallucinatory, while avoid-
ing the narrative sentimentality typical of
standard Surrealism. imagine what the world
would look like if the Ben-day dots of Pop art
were on acid, everything melting and mutat-
ing, gorgeous and terrifying, depending on
the tenor of the trip. others embody a potent
and corrosive beauty, a sublime combination
of breakdown and growth, disintegration
and accumulation, creation and destruction.
think software viruses gone organic, or the
birth of techno-bacteria. this gives you an
idea of the uncategorizable mutations that
take place in Kahler’s wild hybrids and rogue
mongrels. Sometimes it seems as if he paints
pictures of a world of effervescence, in which
solid substances dissolve into roiling gases,
steamy atmospheres, and gravity-defying liq-
uid clouds. in his work, it is almost impossible
detail: Dynamic HybriD c-6
2010, 24" x 30" acrylic on panel
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to distinguish between the microscopic and
the cosmic, and everything is richer for the
confusion. Many of Kahler’s paintings appear
to give shape to digital ruins or to electronic
impulses that have eroded, their crisp clarity
fogged over and their streamlined swiftness
encrusted with integrity-compromising impu-
rities. as an artist, Kahler makes a virtue of
glitches in the ordinarily seamless transmis-
sion of digital information, throwing a mon-
key wrench into the machinery that makes
instantaneous communication possible while
upsetting expectations of instantaneous grat-
ification. information overload never looked
better, especially in the paintings that appear
to be solar systems overcrowded with plan-
ets, their orbits impossible because of inter-
planetary traffic jams.
despite the worlds-within-worlds-within-
worlds density of Kahler’s physically resplen-
dent paintings, they do not diminish accord-
ing to the logic of infinite regression. instead,
his complex orchestrations of color, shape,
and texture maintain focus, clarity, and crisp-
ness, their vivid components colliding and
colluding with one another as they create jar-
ring, collage-style disjunctions and animated
compositional rhythms. the centrifugal and
centripetal forces at work in Kahler’s images
generate mental conundrums that enliven the
mind as a viewer strives to put together the
seemingly shattered fragments, to discover,
amid the compelling chaos, an improvised
cartography or ad hoc archaeology.
the secret ingredient that allows Kahler to
shift his paintings into high gear, so that they
seem to move at warp speed, is masking
fluid, an acrylic medium he applies like paint
and then, long after it has dried, peels off,
like masking tape. Between the application
of the masking fluid and its removal, Kahler
applies one or more layers of paint, pouring,
dripping, and blending freely. When he tears
off the masking material, a previously buried
layer of the painting is once again visible.
the past, which had vanished, comes back.
Kahler repeats this step many times in a
single painting, creating a labyrinth in time
and space. the colors he uses add to the un-
certainty about which part preceded which:
brighter tints leap forward, darker ones re-
cede, no matter which step in the sequence
they belong to. this further complicates the
temporal relationship between and among
layers, adding figure-ground ambiguity to
the mix. this makes Kahler a stranger in his
own painting, which allows him to get out of
his comfort zone, to steer clear of facility and
virtuosity and the formulaic cranking out
of what rosenberg would call apocalyptic
Wallpaper. Constantly responding to an
ongoing accumulation of marks, drips, and
spills, Kahler creates largely unanticipated
and wonderfully improvised palimpsests
that open onto endless possibilities.
viewing his paintings takes time. it is an
activity that cannot be done quickly. all of
Kahler’s works have the dazzling, knock-
your-socks-off impact of images unafraid
to compete with everything out there, will-
ing and able to hold their own in the image
glut of modern life, whose capacity for swal-
lowing up subtlety, nuance, and delicacy is
well known and relentlessness. this is where
Kahler’s art works its magic, bringing the de-
liciousness of details, the subtlety of sensual-
ity, the mysteriousness of the unknown, and
the beauty of ordinarily overlooked incidents
to the forefront, where viewers are invited to
savor them and to share them, over and over
again, and never the same way twice.
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BeloW: Duality a-1, 2010
diptych 6' x 8' (each half 6' x 4')
acrylic and oils on canvas
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detail: Duality a-1, 2010
diptych 6' x 8' (each half 6' x 4')
acrylic and oils on canvas
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Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010
3' x 6' acrylic on canvas
detail: Dynamic HybriD a-1, 2009
6' x 8' acrylic and oils on canvas
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Dynamic HybriD c-6
2010, 24" x 30"
acrylic on panel
Dynamic HybriD c-8
2010, 24" x 30"
acrylic on panel
Dynamic HybriD a-1
2009, 6' x 8'
acrylic and oils on canvas
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biotectonica, 2010
3' x 5' acrylic and oils on canvas
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detail: Dynamic HybriD c-3
2010, 3' x 6' acrylic on canvas
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Dynamic HybriD c-2, 2010
3' x 6' acrylic on canvas
Dynamic HybriD c-3, 2010
3' x 6' acrylic on canvas
Dynamic HybriD c-1, 2010
3' x 6' acrylic and oils on canvas
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HybriD a-1, 2010
5' x 5' acrylic on canvas
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detail: HybriD a-1, 2010
5' x 5' acrylic on canvas
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rHomb b-1, 2010
24" x 24"
acrylic and oils on canvas
rHomb b-2, 2010
24" x 24"
acrylic and oils on canvas
Dynamic HybriD a-3
2009, 4' x 5'
acrylic on canvas
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detail: Dynamic HybriD a-3
2009, 4' x 5' acrylic on canvas
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detail: rHomb c-8
2010, 30" x 30"
acrylic and oils on panel
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rHomb c-3, 2010
30" x 30"
acrylic on panel
rHomb c-8, 2010
30" x 30"
acrylic and oils on panel
rHomb c-6, 2010
30" x 30"
acrylic on panel
rHomb c-9, 2010
30" x 30"
acrylic and oils on panel
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HybriD SuSPenSion
2009, 3' x 4'
acrylic and oils on panel
Dynamic HybriD c-13
2010, 2' x 3'
acrylic on panel
Dynamic HybriD c-4
2010, 3' x 4'
acrylic on panel
Dynamic HybriD c-5
2010, 2' x 3'
acrylic on canvas
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detail: Dynamic HybriD c-4
2010, 3' x 4' acrylic on panel
24 Chris Kahler received his BFa at ohio
Wesleyan University in 1991. Within his junior
year of college, he spent a semester abroad
at Parson's School of art and design and
the american University in Paris, France. he
then went on for an Ma at eastern illinois
University in 1992 and an MFa from north-
western University in 1995 where he studied
with ed Paschke, James valerio and William
Conger. he has been teaching at eastern
illinois University since 1999, where he is a
full Professor, graduate Coordinator and
head of the Painting area.
Since 2002, Kahler has had six solo exhibi-
tions in Chicago and St. louis and numerous
thematic exhibitions throughout the coun-
try. recent exhibitions include Synchronous
events- the Works of chris Kahler and charles
Schwall at Purdue University, new Paintings,
il+mo at the edwardsville art Center, Paper
now at i-Space gallery in Chicago, biennial
24 at the South Bend regional art Museum,
le Papier at gescheidle gallery and the (in)
Visible body at niU gallery in Chicago.
Kahler has been awarded numerous honors
including residencies at Painting’s edge res-
idency in idyllwild, Ca and two artist grants
for the vermont Studio Center. his work has
been reviewed and profiled in various art
magazines and newspapers. the most recent
include art in america (Feb 2010), reviews
in the St. louis Post-dispatch (2009) and
numerous reviews in St. louis ranging from
the West end Word to the riverfront times.
recent catalogue essays include: James
Yood for Hybrid Dynamic and Joe houston
for Viral.
his work can be found in various public
and private collections including the daum
Museum, Cortex Building in St. louis, Wash-
ington University School of Medicine in
St. louis, Bradley University and numerous
private collections.
ChRis KahleR
2525BaCK Cover detail:
Dynamic HybriD c-1
2010, 3' x 6'
acrylic and oils on canvas
Photo CreditS:
richard Sprengeler and
Chris Kahler: Paintings
Yuki Kahler:
Portrait of Chris Kahler
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iSBn 978-0-9827872-2-9
PriCe $10.00
130 lincoln avenue, Suite d, Santa Fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]