Nathan Hylden at Art: Concept

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athan Hylden’s solo exhibition entitled “More Over” presented a recent series of works silk-screened, painted, and spray-painted in a restricted palette of black, blue, and white on large aluminum panels. The nine pieces, all untitled and dated 2014, each depict the same banal view of a wall in Hylden’s Los Angeles workspace. They began as sequential photographs of a broken rectangle of masking tape, marking where a vanished artwork once hung. Falling over the wall’s uneven surface are shadows, in some paintings of a solitary chair and in others, of a camera and tripod. These objects shift position slightly from one image to the next, suggesting the passage of time.

To make the works, Hylden overlapped the aluminum panels with the silk-screened images. He then sprayed or swept paint over several panels at once, leaving behind evidence of his process in hard-edged voids and fading spatters. Clearly influenced by such artists as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool, Hylden combines impersonal with gestural marks to produce surprisingly sensuous paintings. At the same time, despite the images’ matter-of-fact simplicity, the series also permits a possible narrative to emerge, with the ghostly, three-legged tripod becoming a stand-in for the artist himself and the chair substituting for the viewer, insinuating his or herself into the picture.