Peninsula is pleased to present
Craig Taylor:
Heads and Grids
, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. In this new group of paintings, Taylor paints symbolic head-like objects set against gridded spaces. Reminiscent of abstracted landscapes that at times suggest atmospheric perspective, the paintings are populated with blocky coalescing portraits, busts on pedestals, and striated monuments set against gauzy and sometimes lurid chromatic grounds. Composed of heavy, expressive, interlocking brushstrokes, the figures still somehow seem to float within their surroundings, their physicality left intentionally ambiguous. The constructed spaces are eerie and evocative, made up of dense shapes superimposed, layered upon, and intermingled with washed-out swaths of bold color.
Taylor’s paintings are made of contradictions. A deeply committed investigation of abstraction laced with anxious humor characterizes his work of the past 25 years. The rendered environments of his paintings are sites for an endless collection of images, with subjects shown as paradoxically solid and vaporous. Taylor describes these pictorial worlds as an “internal psychic blueprint schema” where romanticism, atmospheric landscape painting, hieratic heads, Etruscan cippi, Baudelairean flaneurs, and comics characters like The Thing and Alfred E. Neuman are cross-pollinated as forms and aesthetic motifs, digesting scattered, disparate components into a singularly inventive visual language. Taylor’s painting process—with its sense of existential slowness—is an ongoing meditation on the mechanics of seeing itself.
