Eliot Greenwald: Notes from the Artist

August 4 - October 3, 2020

Always with humor. Humor is one of the most complex and beautiful facets of our reality and language-- visual and verbal.

Powerful humor is able to place us in a location that can terrify and console simultaneously. Humor can be 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.
My first Night Car painting was made last summer while I was primarily working on an ongoing series of portraits. A left over canvas that I would use up paint on at the end of a studio session ended up having an image of a boxy car that was vanishing on it. Another one of these canvases ended up with two vague ‘moons’ on it. The car I painted resembled planet earth. Those were the first times some of the basic imagery appeared.

I had my good friend and artist Mike Taylor over for a beer and a hang, which always would inevitably have some sort of ‘studio visit’ aspect to it. After showing him the new portraits I had made, I picked up one of my leftover “paint” paintings and held it up to him. “ Ehh, ehh, whatcha think!? It’s Night Car, cool right!?” The response I got from Mike was short of barely enthusiastic. I attempted to convince him of the ‘coolness’ of these paintings by explaining the entire mythology, which I made up on the spot and which included the name given to Night Car’s counterpart, Dweeby Dimlight. This didn’t seem to convince him of the paintings’ merit, but it did make him laugh, which was all I really wanted anyway.
THE BOOK

An important facet to this show and to the Night Car series is the book. The book evolved organically. I started making small drawings while at work or away from my studio, to explore different visual perspectives of the Night Car-Dweeby Dimlight relationship. After about five or six drawings, I found that a narrative was forming in the progression of the drawings and so I continued to extrapolate them into a more concise storyline akin to a mythological tale or childrens’ book. I made the Night Car book to stand as an extraction from a never ending loop - one revolution on an infinite wheel. I wanted this book to be brief and stated as simply as possible so that the relationship of subject and environment could be interpreted as widely as possible by the viewer.

Contact the gallery at info@hesseflatow.com to purchase a signed, editioned copy of the book
I recognized the opportunity to turn the basic characters and setting of this work into the framework to build repeated allusions to the cyclical nature of time and paradoxes of consciousness... After I finished illustrating the book, I began making this particular subseries of Night Car paintings. The 19 paintings in this show are enlarged facsimiles of the drawings in the book. The wobbling edges of the canvases and varying sizes are meant to reference the imperfection of the hand and line during my process of drawing.
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