Eli Langer : BAD WEATHER

In his second solo show at Daniel Hug gallery, Eli Langer has painted non figurative forms, shifting surfaces of paint whose rapidly sketched outlines over vague spatial backgrounds, employ strategies of both abstraction and landscape painting but very nearly propose their own rejection by their elusive and fragmentary results.

The viewer puts the painted forms to a cognizance test, scanning for familiar references in the images.

By limiting his involvement in the painting process, Langer becomes a provisional guide behind the development of form, strategically abandoning painting in mid-step, inhibiting paintings’ historical privilege of having nowhere to go but wrong. This consciously iconoclastic practice plays well into the hands of a painter with Langer’s troubled history.

Lateral Magic is the means by which an image of something which isn’t there is described by speaking of it, through its peripheral qualities allowing the central object to remain nearly unacknowledged and calls its presence into question.

Mapping Energy release is the phenomenological diagram of creative energy discharged during the action of painting a brushstroke, which can be considered as the distance paint material was moved in any measurable time unit.

Langer’s paintings waver between focus points of surface and illusion, playing with intangible temporal qualities alluding to prescient matters occurring within the picture plane, the whole apparatus of painting as a prop based on a believe it or not perceptual experience.

Is there a central motif or subject ever intended in these paintings? Are we at the margins of an event which occurs off-screen?

The canvas edges are incidental boundaries to the imagery, the physical edges of which inhibit the painted features from conjugating real space within the sightlines and stratum of this universe.

Pressetext

Eli Langer
“BAD WEATHER”