« We first connect to James Hyde’s works through obvious esthetic hooks like color and surface, even as the canvases don’t seem to follow abstract or representational conventions."
Les filles du calvaire gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of the American artist James Hyde. Based in Brooklyn, the artist returns to Paris with a new set of pictorial works. For over thirty years, his work has been an exploration and experimentation of materiality, mixing mediums (sculpture/fresco, photography, painting, virtual) to raise questions about creation, the work of art. This new body of work uses the pretext of public sculpture by drowning it in a strangeness that shifts the gaze, arouses a curiosity and attention that tends to disappear today in the unique format of our social networks.
Extracts from James Hyde’s Going Public Sculpture by Hovey Brock :
« We first connect to James Hyde’s works through obvious esthetic hooks like color and surface, even as the canvases don’t seem to follow abstract or representational conventions. Then come attempts to decipher the scraps of digital photographic images in the large works that Hyde patches with paint and other materials. These images of public sculptures in various cities derive from Hyde’s avid practice of photography. They are an ironic choice of subject matter as public sculptures in cities rarely engage the attention of anyone except tourists and in the few instances that they do, it is more often as obstacles than artworks. Hyde takes our fraught connection to public sculpture as a gambit to explore the collective nature of cognition, a theme he examines from many angles in his new exhibition, Going Public Sculpture at Galerie les filles du calvaire.
[…] How are we to account for Hyde’s insistence on accentuating pictorial ambiguity in the paintings? Why does he compare and contrast the actual figure-ground relationships between the frescoes and the gallery walls with the pictorial figure-ground relationships within the paintings? Why does he include an augmented reality piece that operates in a different realm entirely from the actual and the pictorial? In part these outcomes derive from his omnivorous improvisation, but in larger part—and of greater interest to us—Hyde’s focus lies not in solving problems but in playing with our expectations. He is at heart a skeptic, and we can understand his paintings, fresco installations, and forays into virtual space as thought experiments about cognition and its handmaiden, vision. […] Hyde’s ambition to knock the viewer off the pedestal of assumptions goes to the heart of his painterly project. »
Hyde takes up the idea that painting comes out of chaos to lead to order and it is up to us to come out of the abyss despite the isolation imposed on us by our technological addictions, to recreate our world through his works.
