Launch F18 and beta pictoris gallery are excited to present Clayton Colvin’s inaugural New York exhibition Slow Your Instruments at Launch F18.
Slow Your Instruments highlights Colvin’s complex yet intimate new works on linen that combine charcoal, graphite, pigment and acrylic in a painterly field of incredible richness and depth. These new works continue Colvin’s exploration of what critic Cinque Hicks recently described in Art in America as his “naked search for new answers to old questions.” Colvin’s subtlety and dexterity comes from a decade-long interrogation of the practices and processes of drawing and painting that has combined a love for studio processes as much as a love for popular culture. Having the capacity to represent the onslaught of technology against the resistance of history is an element of the Zen-like approach to Colvin’s studio practice. Works such as the eponymous slow your instruments (shown on top), contrasts the suggestion of the ubiquitous pixel, with its square shape, against the deep, blue depths of the picture’s plane. Colvin lays what seems to be the process on the surface, with visible brushstrokes, but his works are always far more complex, layered and more faceted and multifaceted, revealing how they have been constructed only upon a close, intimate, personal expression.
Colvin understands the history and discourse of painting, but he moves past it in precisely the same instant that he reveals it. Make Believe (shown on left) creates a new constructivism, one that owes far more to the structure of digital code and the syntax of language than it might to the frameworks of a twentieth century history. Colvin’s individual and artistic history is contemporary, and one might regard the titles of his works merely as observations or exhortations to shared experiences or actions: Natural Baggage might weave a latticework of memories, challenges or experiences in the same moment that Brain Wash suggests a new beginning as much as an indoctrination.
By keeping his new works only sixteen by twenty inches, Colvin creates a collective space for individual experience and self-reflection. Rather than overwhelm with a grand statement, Colvin asks the viewers in. In the naked city where, as we know, there are so many stories, he invites each of you to step in more closely, to take a moment, to take a breath, and to slow your instruments.
Slow Your Instruments is on view from February 27 through April 26, 2014. For further information contact Tim Donovan or Sam Trioli at Launch F18 : launchf18@gmail.com (603) 345.5915