Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present Fields, Evan Nesbit’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. On view will be a new series of modified paintings which aim, through color and material relationships, to continue Nesbit’s perceptual investigation of the performative within painting. The works on view are made by manipulating acrylic paint through the perforations of a vinyl mesh on which a photo has been digitally printed. Organized and executed through this mechanical registration and distribution integrates the pigment within the grid structure of the substrate, effectively capturing the gesture in the making of each work.

The specifics of this process generate a textured field of color suspended over the low relief of the painting face. Our gaze drifts over this spatiality, defined by the paint’s physical weight, following how the transference of color is transmitted through dappled warm and cool divisions of light and shadow. Some of the paintings are achromatic, produced with a small amount of pigment distributed in the acrylic; others appear blown out in a thickly saturated monochromatic haze of fluorescence.

This new series continues Nesbit’s interest in material based abstraction and concepts of perceptual psychology. As with his earlier burlap paintings, the surface inversions derived from the paint pushed through the weave activates the shifting relationship between form and image. Though now there is a different kind of mark as well as a different surface quality: one that is at once physical and digital. The vinyl fabric is characterized by its thin weave comprised of identical round holes which takes on paint uniformly, though unlike the burlap, the grid never fully subsides under its weight. The conspicuous absence of the grid highlights the prevalent digital/analogue hybridity in contemporary art practices; Nesbit’s process of painting is a way of reimagining this digital field, with his gesture being not so much removed as it is made mechanical. Here, the material and images set up contradistinctive relationships - the automated precision against the charged materiality of paint - to actualize a fabricated imagined space within a still image.

The resulting work functions as paintings by way of their objecthood, extending the discourse of painting and its vocabulary. Fluidity is sequentialized as the affective quality of light highlights the various nouns and pronouns rendered in either print or paint throughout the works in the show. They offer a suspended visual exchange, a field of vision which dissolves to offer a slowly shifting view of the same imagery. Between the fissures and spaces of each title emerges a framework: a feedback loop that gains traction within the imagistic and conceptual undercurrents between the paintings.

EVAN NESBIT (b.1985) lives and works in Grass Valley, CA. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and Yale University (MFA), where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize. Nesbit has had solo exhibitions at 11R (New York), Koki Arts (Tokyo), and James Harris Gallery (Seattle), and has been included in group exhibitions at Praz-Delavallade (Paris), 18 Projects (Berlin) and Sean Kelly (New York), among others.