Roberts Tasks is happy to current Discovering Figures, an exhibition of latest works on paper by Daniel Crews-Chubb, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Constructing on his earlier exploration of the determine’s formal and philosophical potentialities, Crews-Chubb’s new works take an more and more summary course, aiming to uncover the timeless and common fairly than the up to date and particular.
For almost ten years Crews-Chubb has centered the determine in his work, utilizing it as a versatile motif that blends historical references to Aztec deities and Hindu gods with newer artwork historic influences, together with Cubism, Summary Expressionism and the CoBrA motion. His figures, whether or not solitary or in teams, are deliberately devoid of defining options that may tie them to particular races, genders or cultural identities. By permitting them to be learn as archetypes fairly than embodiments of particular historic durations, Crews-Chubb invitations viewers to contemplate the physique in a extra elementary and first sense—as a vessel of power fairly than a container for subjectivity.
Although Discovering Figures marks the primary time that Crews-Chubb will solely exhibit works on paper, he has retained the materially dense, compositionally frenetic and formally complicated qualities which are typical of his works on canvas and that are due largely to the style during which he paints, a course of he likens to sculpture. Starting along with his substrates on the ground, Crews-Chubb then covers them with a wide selection of supplies, together with acrylics, oil pastels, charcoal, sand and inks, whereas seldom utilizing brushes for the appliance or refinement of his compositions. As soon as the tough define of a silhouette or compositional construction has emerged he strikes every work onto the wall and continues to each add and take away materials as he searches for the best steadiness of determine and floor, form and environment. Like his selection of supplies, Crews-Chubb’s palettes are diversified and expansive and so they specific his curiosity in pairing colours and supplies evoking the natural and pure with people who appear synthetic, industrial and irrefutably new.
The drive in the direction of better levels of abstraction in these works is reflective of Crews-Chubb’s ongoing curiosity in pareidolia, the psychological and perceptual phenomenon whereby people understand order, patterns or construction in in any other case random and diffuse stimuli, as when a face or object is seen amidst fleeting cloud formations. This deeply human and common drive to transform the summary into the concrete takes on a proper dimension in Crews-Chubb’s works, during which figures are considerably discernible and seemingly on the cusp of dissolving into the bigger world of their compositions. The inner break up between order and its absence is rarely resolved in these works. As a substitute, each potentialities exist concurrently and in productive stress with each other.
Discovering Figures will open to the general public on January 25, 2025. Nevertheless, as a result of present circumstances, there won’t be a gap reception.
