DOUBLE EXPOSURE

 

July 27 - September 7, 2024
Opening Saturday, July 27th 12–5p


Nathan Dilworth

I’ve known Nathan since 2008. I had just graduated from art school, and a mutual friend hooked me up with a job working for the same artist Nathan was working for at the time. On the first day of work, Nathan had me traverse Lower Manhattan with him, popping into storefront after storefront, running errands, getting niche photo equipment and overpriced sandwiches. I was a bright-eyed and ambitious kid, with rheumatoid arthritis, who had only ever moved at my own pace when visiting the big city from Central Jersey for three-plus years. Nathan was from Dallas, but whatever remnants of a drawl that were perhaps once there had been flushed away after a few years of criss-crossing the five boroughs. He walked at the speed of a laid-back gazelle and talked at the speed of a hungry coyote. Sometimes I felt like I could hardly keep up with him.

When I first met Nathan, his work was rooted in a more self-referential conceptual practice that utilized photography and had its own whimsical, intuitive logic; in only a few years, he had become a painter (of sorts)?! Now, eleven years have passed since I left New York for Los Angeles, and he and I are both fathers. I often think about how parenthood affects us all, both personally and professionally. Being an artist often innately feels like being a dog owner – you love your practice more than anything, but you are also obligated to tend to it as much as you possibly can and prove to it that you seriously, genuinely love it. Then, if and/or when you become a parent, everything slows down. Your priorities shift; your preferences and tendencies do, as well. You grow and evolve in countless, unpredictable ways. There aren’t really any metaphors to accurately and appropriately illuminate this extraordinarily intimate metamorphosis. It can make one feel rushed or lost or lazy or pathetic; it can make one question everything they are doing, and everything they have done. Or it can give one an extreme burst of energy and a fresh outlook on life; it can make one question everything they are doing, and everything they have done (but in a good way).

Nathan’s newest pieces, on view here at Sarah Brook Gallery, are simultaneously the most painterly and the most photo-referential things I’ve ever seen him make. And this is what we’re all seeking to eventually, ultimately achieve, right? That is, all of us creative folks want our interests and pursuits to match our talent and knowledge and have everything all come together in some unexpected, holistic manner in order to thoughtfully and properly express our ideas and opinions. When I encounter a painting like “Spooky Action from a Distance,” for example, I have to take it in – all of it – and I encourage others to do the same. It’s not common that we have the opportunity to see something at once be so full of positive life and free movement, while also being intensely enrapturing, almost suffocating – and I think that is what I’m talking about with the desire for the unexpected, holistic achievement.

Nathan is slipping into a strange sexiness with these oil-on-linen images, whether he knows it or not, and I am all for it. At first glance, these are abstractions, but so is everything at first glance. You can see arms and a torso and botanical snapshots; dozens of little moments reveal more to you the more you zone in and out of the worked surfaces. The pastel scratches and schmears draw you in and keep you still. And maybe after all those years of walking like a laid-back gazelle and talking like a hungry coyote, Nathan agrees with what Dave Longstreth once wrote: “Stillness is the move.”

-Keith J. Varadi, July 2024

Nathan Dilworth (born in Dallas, Texas, 1983) received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, and studied at the De Ateliers Studio Program in Amsterdam. Dilworth’s recent exhibitions include Future Fair, “Deluge” at Launch F18, and “Future Starts Slow” at Launch F18. His work is held in the collections of J.P.Morgan Chase Bank, and Citigroup, among others. Dilworth lives and works in Brooklyn N.Y.

Spooky Action from a Distance, 2024
Oil on linen
72 x 60 inches

Double Exposure – Sun Spots, 2024
Oil on linen
23 x 20 inches





Double Exposure – Apparition, 2023
Oil on linen
23 x 20 inches

The Sensational Body, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 48 inches

Double Exposure – The Theory of Perspective, 2023
Oil on linen
23 x 20 inches

Untitled, 2024
Oil on linen
17 x 15 inches

Untitled, 2024
Oil on linen
23 x 20 inches