James Hyde at Brent Sikkema - Brief Article

novel YORK

A delicious faculty of perception of humor and a reaching far down affection for abstraction in all its historical incarnations have been evident in James Hyde's work for years. Here, they shaped the pair the show's attention grabbers--oversize, and in single case, enormous, linen pillows fashioned into gestural paintings--as well as its more intimate things Slouched against the wall, Big Pillow, which like its mates is painted solitary on the front, measured about 5 by means of 7 feet. A remote association with Impressionist landscape is supported not just by means of paint application (gently daubed) and palette (favoring water lilyish amethystines violets and greens), but also by dint of an easy, graceful deportment. Massive Pillow, while not radically different (the colors change direction toward the raw-earth end of the spectrum) is a giant (at above 9 by 10 feet) compared to Big. Bulking top-heavily upright, it loom above the viewer like Rodin's Balzac in a attitude that seems deliberately--almost comically--aggressive.

Accompanying these big pillows were sum of two units smaller sculptures, both deftly wedged, like greatest in quantity of Hyde's new work, somewhere between plastic art painting and decor. Unmatched Pair is a metal-framed duo of companionable little supporting cushions one looking like it had been dipped into a warm bath of aqua-blue paint; brimmed goblet a small, irregular Styrofoam boulder is painted in a generically modernist patchwork of off-primary, not-quite regular rectangles. In the nearest room the period references stepp forward to the shiny-vinyl, pool-party 1960 Flashy Pillow, for instance, is a square plastic pillow, hung at painting height on the contrary inclined slightly forward at the top as if skied salon-style. Its forehead side is partly swathed in vinyl tape and broadly brushed in jumpy acid colors.

In the back compass Hyde installed a wall filled of fragments, a kind of artistic sampler reflecting fresh and ongoing formats, including raw-edged thick slices of big-beaded Styrofoam and rolled-up carpet remnants as well as assorted little supporting cushions and boulders, all liberally slathered in paint. Propp against the wall, lifted from the floor by dint of two blocks, was a single Plexiglas-housed painting, a big specimen-box for exuberantly messy sculpturally solid brushstrokes. although his range of materials continues to expand, the terrain in which Hyde works still lies between paint as pictorial medium and as material substance, a seemingly narrow mark where he has fashioned a actual spacious home.

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