Valleyscape

About

Considering the uniquely American collision of grandeur and banality, Valleyscape, Jack Hoyer’s most recent painting, his largest to date, finds the artist returning to the landscape of the American West as both subject and metaphor. The viewer is presented a vision of a sloping hill in the Verdugo mountains, once the territory of the Kizh people, sharply demarcated by a lightly clouded blue sky. Vegetation marks its craggy dips and folds, as the forms stretch beyond the canvas interminably outward.

A realist–decidedly not a photorealist–Hoyer avoids gratuitous texture and shoehorned sensuousness, preferring frank legibility and its consequent immediacy. Abundant and generous, Valleyscape takes care not to confuse directness with terseness; it continuously reveals itself to the viewer through layers of thin oil paint that give way to an inner light source carefully maintained and ultimately artificial. Unifying the canvas, that inner light lends the painting a vibrational, all-over hum that further distinguishes it from photorealism and the naked experience of looking, quietly corroborating Hoyer’s process of making a composite reference image of stitched together pieces of a single subject.