Nathan Hylden.

Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles CA February 10 * March 10, 2007

"Again and as if to begin," Nathan Hylden's debut show at Richard Telles, displays a combination of untitled objects ranging from paintings, collage, sculpture, and ephemera, altogether unified by a tightly knit set of formal preoccupations and themes. Despite the limited palette--black, white, and neon orange--Hylden's skillful yet playful variations do not feel restricted or monotonous. What emerges from observing the paintings in close succession, say, is a marked departure from paint as such toward the painting process itself, in which the brushstroke has now devolved into overlapping zones of density. In one set--the black-on-black acrylics on linen--the surface facture has actually been systematically sculpted out to form a reflective sheen, in muted contrast to the more even finish of their underlying supportive layers.

Although this layering effect might suggest a rather conceptual approach to painting, here it appears to have more to do with the gesture of revealing an absent concept behind every conceptual/ retinal form of recurrent patterning. In fact, Hylden almost flaunts the fullness of this empty gesture, adroitly negotiating hard-edged borders, odd canvas threads, and angled convergences of line. Further to this conceit are nine collage and painted works on paper arranged in even rows of three. These black-framed newspaper cutouts, which depict an ongoing construction site where several figures can be seen erecting the wooden skeletal frame of a house, are invariably sliced through with recurring vectors or strokes, causing interference patterns less tessellated than just indiscernibly there. It slyly insinuates the very act of collage as a form of nonrepresentational abstraction.

The next, somewhat larger and intense cluster of paintings alters viewer perception by turning eye movements into gestures themselves. The shallow-to-extreme-orange hues fill out the canvas volume through columnar arrangements of hatching, all intermeshed by the degree to which they overlap or don't. It is as if painting can no longer be beheld, beholden to, or kept at a distance in the traditional pictorial sense, having now transmuted into a pure distance of always emergent, eye-catching forms. Just as one should view the black paintings at an angle to grasp their precise edge-to-edge placement, so the same goes for the larger set, but with a minor (and major) qualification. For, looking back from the opposite end of the gallery, what in fact appear as smudgy, broken-up and twisted outlines of these colorful shapes are but mere reflections in two polished aluminum sculptures diagonally placed across the middle of the room. Looking back toward the gallery entrance, however, only two white folded screens remain, forging a discreet if effective break in visual perambulation. These vector-like monochromes lend substance to the shadowy hallway, momentarily blanketing the installation in a wall of whiteness.