A syntax of irregular, disarticulated, and structured forms typifies Wyatt Kahn’s three-dimensional wall is effective, assembled into compositions as abstract as they are connotative. Think about A Bar, in which geometries of semi-round apertures, cut out of sq. enclosures, accumulate on a dense area, like seared-through coasters or half-empty eyeglasses remaining in disarray on a countertop. Or Untitled (Him and Us), which reprises a motif common to Kahn’s lexicon―a vertical system articulated by way of the accumulation of a stack of thin, rib-like bands at its core, amplified, wrapped, even embraced by rigid U-formed arms that lace in excess of and less than the main ground. Anthropomorphizing metaphors crop up effortlessly, as he playfully straddles the line in between geometric abstraction and figuration, involving portray and sculpture, all the though intervening in each individual category’s respective and entangled historical lineages and discourses. And then there are his titles: The Lady with Hoops, Acrobat. Kahn’s syntax, articulated in type, is a grammar of symptoms within just which language, much too, plays an important part.
Consider Standing Bather, an assembly of vertical edged columns staging a accumulating of sorts—one that culls from the wide annals of art historical figures of the bather, only to render them below, unadorned, uncooked, unmodulated, as mere evocation. The subjects in this sequence, hinted at irrespective of the seeming abstraction of Kahn’s forms, are deeply embedded in fields of reference spanning art history, but also the day to day, the domestic, the personal, the imagined: Acrobat could gesture to Picasso’s 1930 titular portraits of versatile figures contorting the human sort into inconceivable postures, but it might just as effortlessly evoke objects as quotidian as the step ladders in the artist’s studio and dwelling, to say practically nothing of the narrative possibilities that may crop up from the conflation of both of those nouns. Kahn never ever completely casts out the topic alternatively, it could possibly reappear only since abstract geometries lend it new type.
Without a doubt, by means of his elaboration of the shaped canvas―a task he has carried out given that the commence of his artistic career―Kahn has taken a special technique to pictorial concerns, refracted as a result of a sculptural lens. If his work has developed at the intersection of portray and sculpture, it has also, more a short while ago, intentionally revisited both mediums as impartial fields within just which to reenact and often expand on–the experiments carried out at their crossing. In “Knots & Figures,” a new collection of oil paintings on canvas, elaborated alongside corresponding or associated shaped canvases, compress the latter’s dimensional participate in in just a solitary pictorial plane. In their elaborate overlays of traces, varieties, shades, and strokes, Kahn’s oil paintings are like aggregates of the additive and subtractive procedures that advise his wall operates, reverse-engineered to redeploy these operations in a purely pictorial register. Here, determine and ground hover and supplant just one a further fluidly, suspended at the floor that both equally recedes and advancements in depthless space. With these forms’ sculptural analogues in mind, for Kahn, painting can never reassume its static spot as the medium of illusion, nor can it only accomplish as the medium of flatness.
Unsurprising, but definitely not unremarkably, then, is Kahn’s embrace of significant-aid, approximately absolutely free-standing sculpture in a new collection of modest, solid bronzes. Even though his sculpture has taken monumental dimension in his 2021 general public operates commissioned for outside screen, these new bronzes are fewer environmental than they are object-like, intimate, visceral even, in their literalization of the inner, formal relationships evoked in his “flat” wall-hung performs. Endowed with quantity and mass, these sculptures render airplane and line in house: slender serpentine lines turn out to be intestinal conduits knotted and wrapped around a central, supporting condition described by optimistic mass and lower-out voids. These are acquainted staples of the artist’s visible repertoire resurfaced, or reconstituted as extra than, over and above, surface―a transposition that, across mediums, components, supports, and substrates, adds nevertheless a different dimension to Kahn’s ongoing undertaking.
Rachel Valinsky
at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna
until December 22, 2022
