Caleb Taylor
Caleb Taylor is a self-described process artist. Assessing Taylor’s abstract paintings and drawings as a viewer, it is difficult to discern what is premeditated and what is purely expressionistic. My studio conversations with the artist confirm that it’s some of both. Taylor’s approach vacillates between the deliberately intuitive and the meticulously planned. Working in painting, drawing, and mixed-media collage, Taylor uses expressionistic lines and forms to create fixed moments that vibrate gesturally within a composed frame or window. Forms are rendered spontaneously and then stenciled, cut out or covered scrupulously (the latter term is Taylor’s preference). Taylor combines three-dimensional suggestions of architectural forms or skyline sketches, which hum in a background layer, with a flat framing device or obstructive form in the foreground layer. This flat frame hovers between our gaze and the staccato under-painting, revealing only parts of it, and suggesting that the under-painting is the real meat of Taylor’s work. It is this undulating tension between the surface plane and the under-painting that keeps me engaged. When we are in the middle of these layers, literally in between, a relevant or pleasurable transformation of perspective can occur. Moving from chaos to order and back again, we are reminded of how one extreme cannot exist without the other.
Taylor is always conscious of this paradoxical play between moments of action and repose in his work. He navigates from a lineage that includes Ellsworth Kelly’s early grid paintings turned wall sculptures and Al Held’s transitional works, such as The Big N from 1964. Taylor’s larger, life-size paintings have a figurative/anatomical subtext, however, that serves to further underscore the theme of bodies at rest and in motion. While the surface plane covers most of the under-painting with voluptuously curved edges, the oil on canvas build-up in these substantial strokes also mimics the artist’s body in real space as it bends and stretches over and again to create a smooth, regular surface. These covered works recall, as Taylor says, “the skinning over of paint,” as on a discarded palette.
Scanning Taylor’s studio, I am particularly attracted to his collage works on paper and to his carefully arranged piles of source materials. I am drawn to cut bits of paper, found antiqued prints, storybooks, and coloring book pages because I know they will likely find their way into a collage or other work—and sooner rather than later, since Taylor progresses so quickly from one phase to another. It is a challenge to keep up with Taylor’s evolving practice, as it is to follow his formal twists and turns. Recently, Taylor has been researching local companies to consult about how to turn the formal elements of his paintings into something more sculptural. He plans to incorporate one of these initial explorations in his installation at Grand Arts.
In his ongoing Gesture drawings, a series begun earlier this year, Taylor traces and cuts what appears to be a knotted line out of paper. These drawn knots could be paths, strings, streams of more or less consciousness, roads, trails, entrails, end trails. Indeed, these pieces have guts and here again it is Taylor’s persistence toward the tension of abstract forms breaking and peeking through a controlled surface plane that sticks.
From Essay by Lacey Wozny, Assistant Director, Grand Arts, July 2010.
