Darren Waterston: Notes from the Air
Through October 3, 2020
Darren Waterston: Notes from the Air
DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Darren Waterston: Notes from the Air, featuring new paintings.
Evensong No. 4, 2020. Oil on wood panel, 20 x 18 inches.
Waterston’s paintings are a continuation of his uniquely descriptive approach to expressing states of consciousness, using the landscape as metaphor and poetic space. The works depict otherworldly environments - nature as a heady fever-dream, destabilized and teeming with quiet activity. They are alluring, and on the threshold of the recognizable and the fantastical.
“I often start out constructing a painterly description of space and spatiality, which may include sky, clouds, rocky cliffs, a verdant glade, but with every descriptive execution there is always the counterpart of abstraction and playful distortion of what is being depicted. I love the interchange between the beautiful and the monstrous.”
Evensong no. 1, 2019
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
This sublimity is further underscored by shifting perspectives, geological, voluptuous forms morphing diaphanously, and fluid layers of deep, saturated color. Waterston is especially interested in exploring how a profound sense of vastness can be achieved and expressed on smaller scale panels, on view for this exhibit.
For the four Evensong paintings, Waterston simulates feelings, sensations, and fractured images experienced in one’s dream-state. They were created and now exhibited closely together, as Waterston often works like this, structuring a body of work like symphonic variations.
The exhibition title is taken from a volume of selected late poems by John Ashbery, whose themes of nature, wonder, and experience continue to be an important influence on Waterston’s work.
In 2020, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London opened Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre: Whistler's Peacock Room Reimagined, a detailed and decadent interpretation of James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famed Peacock Room, a sumptuous 19th-century interior. Filthy Lucre was created by the artist in collaboration with MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. His previous solo exhibition, Uncertain Beauty at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2014-2015), ran concurrently with the exhibition that featured Filthy Lucre at Freer | Sackler Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (2015-2017).
Symphonic Landscape, 2020
Oil on wood panel
59 1/2 x 71 1/2 inches
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Evensong no. 1, 2020
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
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Evensong no. 2, 2020
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
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Evensong no. 3, 2020
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
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Evensong no. 4, 2020
Oil on wood panel
20 x 18 inches
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Every New Tempest, 2019
Oil on wood panel
36 x 24 inches
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