Pace Prints is pleased to announce Longing For The Light, Love Letters From The Gloaming, an exhibition of monoprints by Austin Eddy, on view February 16 – March 23, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. This presentation will focus on unique paintings made with paper pulp at the Pace Paper studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. An opening reception will be held Friday, February 16, 6–8pm.
Explore Austin Eddy's collaboration with Pace Paper in our online viewing room.
Austin Eddy’s new series is a love letter to the end of day; a time that signals a pause on work, the unfilled space on a schedule before settling into evening rituals and slumber. The quiet palette, subject matter, and the symbolism he discovered in the process of papermaking each contribute to the impression of stillness in these unique works that inspires internal reflection.
The base of Eddy’s series are multi-process paper pulp paintings, many augmented with hand-drawn elements and collage. While experimenting with this medium he discovered that it recorded time in a more visual way than in his own studio drawing and painting practice. Once the layers of paper pulp dry and are passed through the press, they flatten into one image and the history of the mark making is compressed onto a single plane and essentially erased. The visual silence induces a state of harmony, as though they were never made but have always existed.
Though prominent in his work for several years, the motif of the bird is freshly animated in a subdued palette of taupe, inky blue, and earthy gray, among other colors. In For Lovers, a translucent white bird bows its head in reverence over a backdrop of deep mauve signaling the greeting of dusk. The energy radiated by the spare form and muted color of the image inches toward the expression of hibernation.
Many of the nocturnal scenes depicted in this series reference lived experiences by Eddy and his loved ones but are distilled into symbolic pictorial language. Numbers, textures, colors, shapes, and patterns pay tribute to components of personal memories of the artist while providing the tools for the viewer to create their own dreamlike associations. For example, The Silence Of A Stream Side Field At Night depicts a bird with markings that allude to internal motion, like springs, propelling it over a blanket of seeds. The bird oscillates between the abstract composition of its parts and surroundings, leaving much to the imagination in terms of what might depict the setting of a story or exactly the marks you see in the paper.
Austin Eddy finds a parallel in celebrating the time between day and night and the space between symbolism and representation, leading the viewer to meditate on the beauty of ambiguity.