D’Amelio Terras, New York
October 30 – December 23, 2010
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present Autumn Buffalo, its first solo exhibition of work by Daniel Hesidence. This exhibition marks the first time work by a single artist has occupied the entire gallery space, including both the main gallery and the Front Room.
The Autumn Buffalo series, conceived as a symphonic suite with a succession of calm and fast movements, has a scale and pictorial bravura that immediately sets it apart. Hesidence’s work does not rely on nostalgia, visual culture, nor pay ironic tribute to artists of admiration. Rather, Hesidence locates information through a concentrated process of creation, forming an elusive space that takes the viewer beyond a definable language. Like the highly improvisational and gestural European “Art Informel,” his paintings are uncompromising, wild, and aggressive. Often evocative of moods both dark and elated in the same canvas, they are past description, unutterable in their fluidity and intricate logic. For both painter and viewer, these works embody a vitality that unabashedly consumes the senses. Bob Nickas writes: “In the hands of Hesidence, particularly as his work became more abstract and took on greater scale, the brush is an emotional tool, a prosthetic extension of his body. The paintings are pure energy: they are ‘live.’ Hesidence‘s virtuosic brushwork is evidence of body and mind in perpetual motion: painting and painter perform.” (Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting. New York, NY: Phaidon Press 2009: p. 134)
Autumn Buffalo is a series of sixteen paintings that Hesidence produced as a single volume through a focused and investigative period of painting. Each work embodies its own scale and presence, from small pictures of abstracted figures to vast atmospheric landscapes as large as 102 x 132 inches. The brushwork, sometimes frenzied and other times controlled, showcases a complex range of mark making that codes each painting with unique punctuation, prompting a vacillating flow of visual data. The title Autumn Buffalo hints both to the work’s chromatic hues of predominantly rust and brown with bursts of green, turquoise, and mauve, and also to the American bison, the largest extant land animal indigenous to the North American continent and the carrier of many signs native and modern, desolate and triumphant.
Daniel Hesidence was born in Akron, OH in 1975 and currently lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include: Le Tableau at Cheim & Read, New York, NY; ROSE LAUGHTER Winter Holiday, curated by David Altmejd at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY; Cave Painting: Installment #1, organized by Bob Nickas at Gresham’s Ghost, New York, NY; and 1 7 7 9 / Pedestrians at Feature Inc., New York, NY.
