New Paintings. Ethan Gill

About

Ethan Gill’s new paintings present the pool as a psychological space, permeated by west coast light and used to reflect upon form, memory, and isolation. The paintings depict figures in swimming pools: legs, feet, and partial views of bodies caught in the act of submerging or at rest as the movement of light and water interrupt the figure and graph of tiles. As he paints without visual references, both figuration and abstraction emerge from within the grid in the process, allowing the subconscious to materialize form. Light, color, and refraction overtake the order of intersecting vectors. The heft and weight of a body as it succumbs to the water, hemmed in by tight framing crops or morphing into tessellated shapes, displace the water, disrupt the grid, and unmoor the body from physics and form.