Paul Heyer
The Night Gallery
2276 East 16th st.
Los Angeles, CA 90021
OCtober 12 – November 9
Night Gallery presents “The Sun Can’t Compare,” an exhibition of new work by Paul Heyer. This is the artist’s second solo show with gallery and will be on view from October 12th to November 9th, 2013.
There is a special fish, sightings of which are extremely rare and occur most often when the creature has been washed ashore after death. It is colloquially called “the king of herrings,” and is known to be around thirty to fifty feet in length. It feeds on krill, squid, and smaller fish that swim close to the surface of the water. In order to better see its prey, the king swims vertically, his body a long silvery ribbon pointing towards the sun. Oriented this way, the millions of tiny marine creatures become backlit by the sun’s rays, spotting with black the watery boundary before the sky. The king of herrings looks at the sun, blinks, sees snow falling against the night.
Combining oil paint with sand, silk, ink, and shells, this suite of paintings and sculptures is materially rich and poetically spare. The work’s relationship to nature is as hyperbolic in its aim as it is reduced in its means. With a heightened sensitivity to material, color, and light, Paul Heyer has made nebulous these distinctions. Meditative and vibrant, this new work invites a slower unmediated experience – a primordial glimpse of the future.
As with Casper David Friedrich’s “Wanderer,” there is a mythic offering at hand: a gateway that cannot be entered but simply asks you to behold. Empathic with the Romantics’ infatuation with nature’s correspondence with the mind, “The Sun Can’t Compare” offers a landscape without habitat, an other-world without place. Like the king of herrings, these moments are a rare and slippery sight.
The Sun Can’t Compare opens Saturday October 12th, 7-10pm
