John Dilg: Leaving the New World Event

Opening on Friday, January 13, 6 – 9 pm
Artist Presentation: John Dilg speaking about his work
Friday, January 13, from 7 – 8 pm

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce the second solo exhibition by the American artist John Dilg.

John Dilg’s new old-school paintings in his exhibition Leaving the New World navigate taxonomies of painted forms derived from found images and his memory of the American landscape. These paintings variously depict trees, tree stumps, fractal regrowth, steep-faced mountains, lakes, waterfalls, moons, and a tornado. These images collectively suggest a place that absorbs time and its changes with a calm, sentient alertness. While they reference the landscape through their image forms, they also reveal painting as landscape through their process, as the thin canvas with its visible weave becomes the terrain in which paint is affixed. The gentle chroma—from earth and cedar to pale viridian and steely gray—is carefully applied with an open surface dry-brush scumble. These paintings emit an internal glow, fluidly transporting us to vast realms, temporal and atemporal, and propelling a psychological journey through archetypal associations. Dilg’s paintings seduce the viewer with their formal specificity and craft and the varied art references they conjure. Memory provides the forms and compositional relationships. All the paintings look back at the viewer, quietly confident of their own vitality. He confines himself to a narrow range of tones and temperatures, with the subtlety seen in the paintings of Morandi, Klee, Pissarro, and Vuillard.