Nate Ethier. Wilderness

About

Wilderness focuses on formal abstract painting through an exploration of nuanced colors and simple repetitive shapes. The paintings on view were created in 2017 and further Ethier’s interest in pictorial relationships between systems and counter systems. This exploration of color and shape reveals a larger fascination with shifting perceptions of interconnected structures.

Employing saturated color, rigorous pattern, and painterly mark-making, Ethier’s abstract paintings simultaneously build and reconfigure themselves in the presence of their audience. Ethier achieves a sophisticated pairing of hues, while using pattern as a means to create something visually regenerative, therefore allowing each interrelation to become a unique work. Each layer within the painting achieves a sort of life or sense of being, by way of overlapping composition and interdependent transparencies, which offer a sense of play and perceptual flux.

The works speak to a deeper sense of how we may perceive and find solace in the limits of our own control. The viewer initially relies on the clarity of the pattern to enter the visual plane, yet, as each layer overlaps another, the painting pushes the viewer further into the whole. The repetition of form establishes a sense of trust with the viewer, allowing for discovery through the layers of colors and tones infusing one another in the paintings; as marks interlace with forms, a beautiful balance is created. In all the work, there is a manifestation of and visual discord between order and chaos.