AFTER TIN MAN by NATHAN REDWOOD
APRIL 14 – MAY 26, 2018

@DENK, DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

 

In After Tin Man, Redwood considers the hierarchy of figurative painting as a subject. Having previously explored the dynamic potential of portraiture, landscape, and still life, Redwood embraces genre painting or scenes from everyday life, imagining a suite of large-scale figurative works suggesting a time to come after an unlikely culprit. In these paintings, grounded in a myriad of historical references, the figure emerges at times forcefully and at others tentatively from within abstract fields. Redwood considers a symbolic alternative to an armor-clad character operating in the absence of a heart. The work emerges as a nostalgic gesture in the face of current cultural and social upheaval: togetherness, humor, cooperation, and human emotion are on display as an antidote to disconnection. Simultaneously, the potential for the opposite is discernible, as our modern human isolation is shared with this protagonist composed of brush strokes and previously inert materials. Shifting deftly between interior and exterior compositional states, the works are narrative in their suggestion of past and present action but remain uncertain evocative propositions rather than compulsory plots.