Galerie Eva Presenhuber is happy to current Planet on the Prairie, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by Iowa-based painter John Dilg. A river is flowing by means of a rugged terrain. The land is hilly and vegetation sparse, however not inhospitable. The water is clear however seems brown as a result of the soil is peaty. The stream is quick and roaring, racing down the hill and over a waterfall that drops right into a darkish pool. Froth is forming on its floor. The greenery is northern. You may see ferns and a few deciduous timber. The time is autumn. Frost hasn’t set but, however the anticipation of winter is already within the air. There’s a massive tree overlooking the river.
The above describes the scene set by Inversnaid, a poem by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) written after his go to to the Scottish Highland (“burn” is a stream in Scottish). But it surely may very effectively be an outline of a portray by John Dilg, 9-Mile Falls for example, with a waterfall dropping right into a darkish pool, rock-strewn hills and northern vegetation. Whereas Hopkins and Dilg come from considerably totally different time, place and society, the worlds they depict rhyme in sure methods.
The character in Dilg’s work, and it’s at all times nature, by no means cities, is wild however tranquil, not arable and clearly not cultivated, although sometimes scarred by felling of its timber. Often the one motion is that of the water. All the time nocturnal, windless. Stillness pervades, however it’s removed from being lifeless. Although animals and other people solely make uncommon appearances, the panorama feels charged. The stillness shouldn’t be that of loss of life, however of dream. Temporal respite from all of the hassles and coarseness of life. Take Copper Canyon. Behind its seemingly frozen calmness, one can sense life teeming beneath each tree, in each crack of the cliff, and below the inscrutable water. Life in Dilg’s work is generally invisible however palpable present.
But, regardless of such charged environment, there’s additionally unmistakeable sense of resignation. However one can’t be positive if that’s as a result of Dilg is displaying us the world recovering from a man-made disaster, or he’s presenting another state of the world that by no means skilled our destructiveness, the world that might have been however by no means was. Items akin to Wanting By means of or Everlasting, the place new indicators of life are sprouting out of the stumps of felled timber, counsel the previous, whereas works like 9-Mile Falls could factors to the pristine nature of the latter. There’s discreet hopefulness for the resilience of wildlife in each eventualities, however we’re virtually utterly absent from them.
As talked about earlier, the character in Dilg’s work, and in addition that in Hopkins’ poem, shouldn’t be cultivated. In pre-modern English, phrases akin to wilderness, wasteland or wildlands merely meant any space that’s not farmed. Architectural historian Vittoria Di Palma for example writes that in medieval English, the time period wasteland “included forests and chases, heaths and moors, marshes and fens, cliffs, rocks, and mountains”. And the phrase wilderness is derived from Outdated English wildēornes, which means ‘land inhabited solely by wild animals’. There’s clear affinity between the states these classical phrases point out and the panorama of the ambiguous world Dilg paints, the place it may both be far, far sooner or later, or it’s a dream of the locations we by no means ravaged. There’s a peculiar sense of timelessness, which permits a viewer to replicate on the age when the character was wild and unknowable, the time language and panorama knew no modernity, and speculate on the world that left modernity behind, without delay. In Wild Life, even a jaguar has returned. They used to roam as far up north as Colorado. Or perhaps they by no means left the world of those work. And jaguar is a dappled factor, a kind of creatures whose complicated sample revealed, for Hopkins, the innate and overwhelming great thing about the world.
Hopkins believed that each pure object and lifeform possesses its personal distinctive inner order which organizes the important vitality it’s imbued with. He known as this order inscape, in distinction to the panorama of the exterior world, the world by which myriad beings, every with its personal completely particular person inscape, coexist in a fragile concord. It’s a worldview infused with boundless vitality, the bouncing sense of liveliness he tried to seize in his idiosyncratic meter, however below fixed risk from human destruction. Whereas Hopkins’ understanding of nature was underpinned by his non secular perception, which explains his limitless enthusiasm for all creation, Dilg portrays the inscape of his topics with the sober acquiescence of our secular time, the place we should confront the planetary scale hurt we’re inflicting. Or may it’s that what Dilg paints is identical world Hopkins noticed, however at evening? The animate nature dominated by the moon? —Yuki Higashino