PRESS RELEASE
It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.
It is a brown tree, that stands alone.
It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.
– Georg Trakl, De Profundis
The new aluminum paintings forming part of Nate Boyce’s solo exhibition Hissing Wind, occupy the visceral core of a practice that moves fluidly between painting, sculpture, animation, and music, each medium informing the next.
The works grow out of a process that is both rapid and recursive. Their surfaces are inscribed with a die grinder- scratched, abraded, and scored with the velocity of drawing on metal. Boyce approaches mark-making as a form of automatic writing: handwriting stretched to its limits, becoming a sculptural accumulation of lines. The material speed of aluminum permits fast gestures, yet the paintings are subsequently reworked over time, layer by layer, line by line. Texture slows the mark, grinds it almost to a halt; flat or smooth passages counter this friction, creating alternating tempos across the surface.
This rhythm of addition and subtraction produces a temporality that remains legible on the surface, which is coated in layers of oil paint, cold wax, and powder pigment, at times eroded with solvents back to the raw metallic ground. The works hover between atmospherics and solidity, producing a short depth of field in which passages of recessed sfumato are interrupted by the texture of the impasto, sculpturally advancing beyond the surface.
A lineage of surrealist automatism and biomorphic formal invention is encoded into the feral but lyrical contouring of the artist’s draughtsmanship. Figures and architectural structures flicker in and out of legibility, as if emerging in the instant before abstraction fully takes hold. Silence, a recurring motif in the poetry of Georg Trakl, another key reference in the artist’s practice, shares space with velocity: the hissing wind, the blur of movement, and the negative space that shapes the pictorial plane.
Hovering at the cusp of abstraction, Boyce’s paintings articulate a world in which movement and erosion, accumulation and disappearance, form and dissolution coexist. They stand as both objects and paintings, records of speed, silence, atmosphere, and the slow passing of time.
Nate Boyce (b. 1982, Kansas City, MO) lives and works in New York, NY. Boyce has also held solo exhibitions at LOMEX, New York, NY; Galerie Pepe, Mexico City, Mexico; TG, Nottingham, United Kingdom; Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; and Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany among others.The artist’s work has been included in exhibitions at numerous venues, including Sadie Coles, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Deitch Projects, New York, NY; and CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA among others. Boyce is one half of Pedagogy alongside Eli Keszler. He has also been a longstanding audiovisual collaborator with numerous musicians such as Bladee, Yung Lean, and Oneohtrix Point Never. He has performed at venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Boyce has also performed alongside electronic music duo Matmos.
The artist’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Boyce received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006.