The gallery is pleased to present “As It Were”, our fifth solo exhibition with Nathan Hylden.

In this exhibition Nathan Hylden presents a new body of work. These works are very much rooted in his earliest paintings on canvas which engaged a process both mechanical and gestural involving sprayed paint and densely layered liner stencil patterns. In the current works the inner space of the paintings is opened, the elements of repetition are points on a grid, squares and circles, richly nuanced in color. Measured and applied at certain intervals, the grided shapes become for Hylden like the pairing of odd time signatures in music, points converge and move apart, creating distortions of pictorial space. One canvas is nearly obliterated black, the field appears to constantly grow into the optical grid. In others, fields of color emerge with time spent looking, revealing details and variations of hue just barely at the limit of perception. The paintings appear to swell or recess into themselves, carving out the thinnest of pictorial space. Holding in suspension, so as to observe, the presence of affect itself.

For Hylden the fascination is this condition of painting as an apparatus for the generation of projected and embodied concepts. This maintenance of this contradiction is the very definition of complexity.