Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Echo, an exhibition of new works by Andrew Dadson, on view in Brussels from September 7 – October 28, 2023. In Echo, Dadson creates dialogue between his painted and photographic artworks, bringing a painterly formalism to his longstanding interest in the relationship between time, material, and the natural world.
Featured in the exhibition are a series of new “wave” paintings, the first of which were exhibited by the gallery in Los Angeles in 2021. In these works, Dadson builds up the surface of the linen with layers of both acrylic and oil paints in cascading repetitions of line– creating a rhythm of curves that grow thicker as the composition moves downwards. Dadson’s aesthetic interest in the effects of slow, geologic time is reflected in his process. The paintings in Echo are a kind of palimpsest, built up over long periods. The repetitive, time-worn gesture of the paint’s application creates a density of material and history, reflecting natural processes of hill, mountain, and valley formations on the Earth’s surface.
While past work in this series zeroed in on the formal configurations of waves, in Echo, Dadson’s waves take on other natural phenomena as well. The hypnotic, repetitive curves might resemble the waning and waxing of tides, but they also might resemble mountain valleys or forests. Meanwhile, viewers are caught in a toggle between two scales: the macrocosmic, geologic scale that represent vast swaths of land from afar; and the microcosmic, material scale that represents what those landscapes comprise—crushed earth, sandy shores, crumpled grasses, the geologic corrosion that might occur after centuries of elemental force, or the crests of hills and mountains that form as tectonic plates smash together beneath our feet.
Throughout Echo, Dadson homes in on the moral-aesthetic relationship between humans and what we qualify as nature. The two photographic works presented in the exhibition depict areas of grass, brush, or weeds that Dadson— prior to taking the photograph— paints with monochromatic biodegradable paint. These nature-paintings and the photographs which document them are also records of a changing contemporary landscape. While scouting locations to photograph, the artist was drawn to abandoned farmlands in the outskirts of Vancouver that were soon to be razed over during the construction of new highways.
The photographs also point to a sustained formal interest of Dadson’s— the unstable frames or edges of an artwork. Though Dadson paints the grasses and weeds depicted in his photographs in irregular shapes, when captured through the precise angle of his camera, they conform to the edges of the standard rectangle. Because this technique produces a flattening effect, it also abstracts the image, imbuing the photograph with a sense of the painterly. Dadson’s manmade marks highlight the space around his nature-painting, confronting the viewer with a level of excess that also acts as a framing device.
The idea that a kind of material excess could serve as a framing device was the origin of his Restretch paintings, also on view in Echo. In the Restretch works, Dadson paints onto a canvas, allowing paint to spill off all four of its edges. He then re-stretches the canvas on larger stretcher bars, creating a border area of clean canvas around the painting. Functioning in a similar manner to his photographs, where the unpainted landscape frames the flattened image of the painted landscape, Dadson’s Restretch paintings are framed by a surplus of paint rather than containing the paint within its borders.
Throughout Echo, Dadson’s medium-specific, formalist approach to landscape aims not
to represent water and earth as one might see them in the flesh. Instead, it aims to construct canvases that themselves serve as small topographies. Rather than trying to represent the landscape, his surfaces therefore become landscapes of their own.
Andrew Dadson (b.1980; lives in Vancouver, CA) has exhibited with Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, CA; 313 Art Project, Seoul, SK; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, IT; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, CA; RaebervonStenglin, Zurich, CH; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.