HUDSON, New York — I first noticed Evan Halter’s fastidious trompe l’oeil work in 2014 on the Mason Gross Faculty of the Arts at Rutgers College, the place he was incomes his MFA and I used to be instructing. By this time, he was already mixing collectively a piece of a classical portray with one thing seen from the actual world, equivalent to a plumb bob. After he graduated, I visited his studio a handful of instances. I used to be significantly intrigued by the idiosyncratic nature of his undertaking, which features a deep devotion to Northern and Italian Renaissance artwork in addition to modernist collage. With this in thoughts, I used to be certain to not miss his solo exhibition, Specificities, at Turley Gallery.
Among the many exhibition’s 15 works, the undated portray “Bouquet (After Ambrosius Bosschaert)” hangs on the wall reverse the collage “Bouquet Research (After Ambrosius Bosschaert),” suggesting that Halter’s work are primarily based on collages for which he has superimposed a sheet of paper with reduce openings over a replica of a portray. Whereas the “shadows” solid by the reduce paper and the “phantasm” of area between the layers is at all times rigorously rendered, I discovered it attention-grabbing to see what adjustments he had made. On this case, the portray is barely greater than 3 times the scale of the collage.
Why is Halter excited about this type of peekaboo seeing? Within the press launch, he states:
My aim is for the work to occupy an area during which it may well recontextualize these acquainted historic artworks, and on the similar time, create one thing new that may act as a way to spotlight the quiet and sometimes neglected moments in each artwork and life.
Halter achieves this aim, however greater than this occurs in the most effective of his work. Referred to as one of many first artists to current floral nonetheless life as a definite style, Bosschaert painted symmetrical, scientifically correct bouquets. It’s this accuracy that fascinates Halter; he desires to achieve a paradoxical second when the viewer is each fooled by and conscious of his deception.
I discovered “Bouquet (After Ambrosius Bosschaert)” to be without delay irritating and pleasurable. I may see what Halter was up too, however, on the similar time, the cutout sections of paper made it inconceivable to understand what all the bouquet seemed like; this impossibility appears to be one in every of his preoccupations. A meticulous painter who appears able to copying a baroque work with exceptional accuracy, I believe Halter is aware of that having the ability to convincingly recreate the fashion of a classical grasp isn’t sufficient. By bringing in trompe l’oeil results, he seems to concurrently undercut and have a good time his personal deftness. However this isn’t the primary cause I’ve adopted the artist for the previous decade.
The undated work “One to One (The Draughtsman of the Lute by Albrecht Dürer)” and “Chalice (After Albrecht Dürer and The Grasp of the Morrison Triptych)” reveal two sides of the artist. Within the former, he transforms a woodcut measuring round 5 by seven inches right into a barely bigger oil portray (eight by ten inches). Based mostly on a replica, Halter’s intimately scaled portray comes throughout as a venerable homage, a susceptible object, whose goal may be talismanic, and an embodiment of craving. Extra than simply an expression of the artist’s subjectivity, it’s a lament for all of the information of portray that has been misplaced to us, from the will for accuracy and precision that occupied Bosschaert and Dürer to the popularity that nostalgia is a part of being a still-life painter. On this sense, Halter’s use of collage is about loss and our incapacity to see the precise world in all its complexity.
“Chalice (After Albrecht Dürer and The Grasp of the Morrison Triptych)” relies on a cutout element from the center panel of the Morrison triptych superimposed onto a element from a Dürer work. The mixture types a white vessel with black particulars peering via the largely purple and black overlay, reversing expectation that the cup is an object fairly than the bottom. Whereas Halter’s reference to the triptych signifies that his chalice has a non secular perform, I might counsel that it serves as a ceremonial object, with no connection to particular spiritual perception or follow. Right here Halter’s craving seems to be for a group of like-minded painters.
I’m reminded of a line that comes close to the tip of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”: “These fragments I’ve shored in opposition to my ruins.” Like Eliot, Halter believes that previous artworks kind a “custom” that he should discover a option to alter with a view to make room for himself. In all places in Halter’s work, we see totally different sorts of alterations, from collage to copying “torn” fragments. These actions counsel that his work isn’t as cooly goal as it would first seem.
Evan Halter: Specificities continues at Turley Gallery (609 Warren Avenue, Suite 2, Hudson, New York) via October 27. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.