HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present Eliot Greenwald's NIGHT CAR, his first gallery solo exhibition in New York City. A book will accompany the exhibition.
NIGHT CAR is a series of paintings and drawings that are the result of a tangent or mutation that was sparked from something unrelated, a transference from one body (of work) to the next. A drawing becomes a book becomes a painting. The canvas is now a canvas with warbly edges, the image is now an image slightly rearranged. New information, new shape, new perspective and all identical by virtue of existence and category.
Greenwald's exhibition is based on the harmonious and symbiotic relationship between Night Car and Dweeby Dimlight. Night Car is represented with the image of a car and Dweeby Dimlight is represented by two planets and the environment around them. As these works are narrative we need to address the relation of narrative to its objects. As Susan Stewart in her book, On Longing asks, "How can we describe something?" She describes narrative as a "structure of desire, a structure that both invents and distances it's object and thereby inscribes again and again the gap between signifier and signified". And that is the project that Eliot Greenwald has engaged in.
Greenwald's powerful humor places us in a location that can terrify and console simultaneously, a glowing brightness which illuminates a small fraction of a darkened landscape. That brightness, that laughter, however small or large it is, however far it casts, is somehow able to at least replace fear of the unknown with curiosity and when curiosity holds you, exploration comes next.
Night Car drives itself and picks up anything that wants a ride. If Night Car opens, any passenger can get in but Night Car will not stop to pick up anything else and it will not reopen. Night Car will just keep driving. [a continuous hum is audible] Dweeby Dimlight's planets are always glowing nearby. Dweeby Dimlight opens its mouth and swallows Night Car whole, along with any passenger, and is happy to do so. Dweeby Dimlight is silent and nurturing. Night Car will always reappear, empty and new, and will always be willing to give a ride. Dweeby Dimlight will always swallow Night Car.
"I am seduced by nowhereness while driving country roads at night. The vague location defined by… there, where my headlights reach, is all I know of my place and, as usual, there isn't a real indication of what time is. I experience what no before and no after feels like as the road in front materializes continuously and vanishes simultaneously within the sphere of my headlight's gaze." --Eliot Greenwald