In the large paintings on view simple geometry and bright flat colors emphatically occupy large panoramic landscapes. Hyde photographed the area around Pyramid Lake fifty miles northeast of Los Angeles over several days in 2009 and 2011. In these paintings, geometric bands to divide and frame the photographic surfaces, at times enhancing the stretch of a panorama, other times creating a mutually reinforcing coincidence of photographic detail and pigment.
Hyde’s new paintings employ photographs as the physical ground to paint on. Although Hyde’s photographs are highly technical and detailed, the images are less important than their embodiment of the photographic condition. For Hyde, photography represents a mnemonic index of the world. The photographic record holds a moment of time, a fragment of a view onto the world. This is the location that Hyde’s paintings take place. Hyde embraces photography as context and subject for painting. His painterly geometry exists independently, but in dynamic relation to his photographs.
