press release
Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Valleyscape, an exhibition of a new painting by Los Angeles based artist Jack Hoyer. Valleyscape is the artist’s second solo presentation at the gallery and will be installed in our Viewing Room from September 10 - October 22, 2022.
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.
Contending with an infinite world populated by interchangeable scenery, Hoyer asks whether reality is its own best representative. More specifically, Hoyer’s work presents a space beyond experience and emotion, rooted in the notion that observing and composing are inextricable from one another. By combining them, Hoyer transforms anonymous fragments of the American landscape into quietly monumental, somewhat discomforting testaments to the individual’s lived reality as ineludibly flexible and fleeting. At the same time, Hoyer’s paintings delicately avoid cynicism, instead offering comfort in cosmic inconsequentiality: America the diversely appointed landmass, not the immortal superpower.
Hoyer’s observations and biases of memory fade as Valleyscape takes shape, and a spellbound whole emerges. Passages of extreme clarity run into hazier ones, as the hulking mountain face vibrates to reveal its massiveness. Conceived and painted over three years, the artist’s meditative process suggests of a project borne out of a necessity not so much for personal expression, but personal actualization: observation, composition, and execution as life-affirming gestures, not painterly techniques. Preferring to work in a continual state of chance and possibility, the real migrates from Hoyer’s eye to his hand, resulting in the sort of absolute truth accessible only through complete subjectivity.