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Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present ERIC HESSE: Signs + Wonder, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition of the artist’s work in encaustic. The exhibition features the artist’s new series of paintings exploring the visual vocabulary of the built environs. The exhibition opens with a reception on November 21st and continues through December 19th.Eric Hesse’s work exists in the space between presence and absence. The paintings nudge the boundary of abstraction while remaining connected to reality through carefully chosen forms. Billboards have appeared in Hesse’s city compositions for many years. In this new series, Hesse dives deeply into the highly recognizable form - exploring it visually and conceptually. Notably, Hesse has removed all recognizable content from the billboards. There is a sense of expectation, of something coming. It is the blank canvas before - or after.
In La Vida Brinca, roughly translated as life jumps, the content of the billboard flows upwards and downwards as if disintegrating into nothingness - the contents obscured and floating away. An almost imperceptible form coalesces from the darkness and spreads across the triptych - a flare of blindingly white fiery intensity illuminating the right side of the composition. Magical clouds play below the billboard - we are floating in the unknown.
In Overshadow II, we are looking at the side of building with the shadow of a billboard cast on the white wall. A jewel-toned abstraction looms in the shadow while the sky and top of the building are nearly indistinguishable. Very fine details situate us in an industrial corner of some unknown city. A safety cone and power lines ground the composition in reality. The paintings hover near representation - almost imperceptibly forms, sometimes seemingly melting into obscurity, place us into the real world.
The surface qualities Hesse is able to achieve in encaustic are exquisite. True encaustic is simply wax and pigment heated and manipulated to create compositions, and to control this chaotic medium to be a master of technique. The colors are jewel-like, the textures range from mottled earthiness to luminous liquid motion, and the finish is a smooth yet velvety incandescence.
With the ubiquitous and highly recognizable billboard shape as the centerpiece of each painting, Hesse is asking us to consider what these forms represent. He has presented us with the longing without an object, and most emphatically, an insistence that mere materialism doesn’t get the last word. By separating the content we are accustomed to seeing on billboards and representing them as the form only, Hesse asks us to consider what happens when that sort of content is removed from our lives. Are these paintings about loss or are they about the freedom that comes when we see the world clearly without the cacophony of consumer culture? That our experience of the sublime is possible in the most mundane moments if we look closely.
ERIC HESSE studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Temple University (Philadelphia), and received his BA from St. Olaf College in 1994. He was a 2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Individual Artist Grant recipient, a Sotheby’s/Artlink International Young Art Finalist (2003), the recipient of the National Foundation for the Advancement of Art Fellowship in Visual Arts (2000, Miami, FL, three-year Residency/Grant), the recipient of the 1999 Minnesota State Fair Merit Award in painting, and was the 1997 Adzak Museum Artist-in-Residence (Paris, France). Hesse has exhibited throughout the United States and in France. He currently lives and works in France.
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2716 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, United States, California 90034, 2716 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034-2642, United States, Culver City
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