Jonathan Edelhuber
Long Days Even Longer Nights
October 28 - December 14, 2018
The Newsstand Project is announcing Long Days Even Longer Nights, a new exhibition of artworks by Arkansas-native Jonathan Edelhuber (b. 1984). He received a B.F.A. with an emphasis on Graphic Design from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas and currently runs a practice out of Nashville, Tennessee. The exhibition will be on view at The Newsstand Project’s Kings Road Café location and will run from October 28 - December 14, 2018.
A cursory glance at Jonathan Edelhuber’s paper and canvas paintings makes immediately apparent their flatness, a graphic condition that recalls the artist’s early training in graphic design. As is, sparse backgrounds and flat, cartoon-like subjects (a perennial zoo of fictitious and non-fictitious humans, flora, and fauna) are compressed into compositions that evoke a dramatic stage. He often accompanies these cartoon-like figures with short, evocative captions often pulled from various ambient sources—poetry, hearsay, and song lyrics are all up for the taking.
Edelhuber’s paintings are generally sparse, but calling them minimal would be a falsehood. The tan-colored, unprepared papers and canvases upon which the artist paints are often textured and dirtied. They feel dense with streaks of charcoal and specks of stray paint, making the surface of each painting rife with an activity that provides a subtle glimpse into the artist’s process. This involves outlining figures and filling them in, but the order is oftentimes reversed. Although their dimensions are restrained and the process relatively straightforward, the resulting paintings are surprisingly complex, rendered from a diverse and at times, antagonistic mixture of water-soluble paints, oils, graphites, charcoals and crayons.
Works like Over Mondays and the series of owls titled and captioned Long Days Even Longer Nights also reveal an explicitly autobiographical approach to painting. Like his captions, Edelhuber purports to drawing content from his everyday experiences, especially as he attempts to juggle child-rearing with the particularities of daily life and work. The artist understands aspects of his own experiences as pseudo-universal and hopes that the audience can immediately relate. His date and signature stamps further reinforce the personal nature of the paintings and are often tied to the end of his captions, always operating as functional elements of a greater composition.
Certain figures and phrases are repeated throughout as well. In this exhibition, the owl and the alligator (which happen to be native to Tennessee) are prominent characters. Some may even be the same “character,” incarnated into a variety of situations which range from the picturesque to the comical.
Additionally on view at The Newsstand Project will be a number of Edelhuber’s flat sculptures, as well as loose, unframed works on paper, all available for the visitor to sort through. TNP
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A cursory glance at Jonathan Edelhuber’s paper and canvas paintings makes immediately apparent their flatness, a graphic condition that recalls the artist’s early training in graphic design. As is, sparse backgrounds and flat, cartoon-like subjects (a perennial zoo of fictitious and non-fictitious humans, flora, and fauna) are compressed into compositions that evoke a dramatic stage. He often accompanies these cartoon-like figures with short, evocative captions often pulled from various ambient sources—poetry, hearsay, and song lyrics are all up for the taking.
Edelhuber’s paintings are generally sparse, but calling them minimal would be a falsehood. The tan-colored, unprepared papers and canvases upon which the artist paints are often textured and dirtied. They feel dense with streaks of charcoal and specks of stray paint, making the surface of each painting rife with an activity that provides a subtle glimpse into the artist’s process. This involves outlining figures and filling them in, but the order is oftentimes reversed. Although their dimensions are restrained and the process relatively straightforward, the resulting paintings are surprisingly complex, rendered from a diverse and at times, antagonistic mixture of water-soluble paints, oils, graphites, charcoals and crayons.
Works like Over Mondays and the series of owls titled and captioned Long Days Even Longer Nights also reveal an explicitly autobiographical approach to painting. Like his captions, Edelhuber purports to drawing content from his everyday experiences, especially as he attempts to juggle child-rearing with the particularities of daily life and work. The artist understands aspects of his own experiences as pseudo-universal and hopes that the audience can immediately relate. His date and signature stamps further reinforce the personal nature of the paintings and are often tied to the end of his captions, always operating as functional elements of a greater composition.
Certain figures and phrases are repeated throughout as well. In this exhibition, the owl and the alligator (which happen to be native to Tennessee) are prominent characters. Some may even be the same “character,” incarnated into a variety of situations which range from the picturesque to the comical.
Additionally on view at The Newsstand Project will be a number of Edelhuber’s flat sculptures, as well as loose, unframed works on paper, all available for the visitor to sort through. TNP
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