Jonathan Edelhuber (b.1984), a Nashville-based artist, combines his love for literature and art. Known for his pop sensibility, his paintings serve as a metaphorical journal entry, as he includes contemporary subjects as a way of “bookmarking” time and thereby signifying the artist’s place along a linear and progressive timeline - both metaphorical and personal in nature. Inspired by Cy Twombly’s incorporation of literature and poetry in his practice, there is a commonality and a shared love for surfaces, line, and colour. He is also inspired by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Picasso, Keith Haring, and Bill Traylor, developing clear links with the historical art canon. The artist successfully reinterprets time-gone subject matter through his unique representations and playful, raw style, serving as a sort of assemblage or juxtaposition which illustrates the idea that nothing is created but everything is transformed. Edelhuber accompanies his flattened, cartoon-like figures with short, evocative captions, often taken from a variety of environmental sources-poetry, hearsay, and song lyrics. This exhibition, entitled Timeline, is an example of the artist’s obsessive behaviour when describing his love for art history books, translating directly into his subject matter.  

 Timeline, is an eclectic display of Edelhuber’s oeuvre. Strongly influenced by Abstract and Neo-Expressionism which he incorporates in his pieces via books and objects. The backgrounds of these works may be sparse and unpopulated but the textured canvas presents a certain grittiness. Some figures are repeated, proposedly one in the same character but embodied in a variety of situations. Exhibited alongside the Stacks of Art Books series is Skulls - a unique and ongoing series borne out of the pandemic. The artist states that “we’ll live and we’ll die and there’s so much beauty in between”, inferencing the cyclical nature of life. The skulls are not intended to be literal but rather to be seen as vehicles for beauty, an anecdote to live life fully every day. With slight inferences to Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics, these paintings represent a portrait of the essence of a soul - with all its colour, vibrancy, shapes, scars, and individuality hung on the substrate of the most basic and recognised human form. Any viewer can look and consider the mode and form of representing the human spirit looking to find something in the paint that they may find in themselves. Edelhuber purports to draw content from his everyday experiences, previously having been described as conceiving his own experiences as pseudo-universal.