Don Eddy’s new exhibition with Nancy Hoffman Gallery is a treasure trove of compression, complexity, color and texture. Typically grouped with the photorealists who came to prominence in the 70s (although Eddy has distanced himself from the term), Eddy is known as a painter who is obsessed with light. Here that ethereal quality comes across as rich and gorgeous, otherworldly and quotidian all at once. Whether it’s sunlight radiating through a sky, pinpricks of windows on the NYC skyline, the delicate veins of a flower, or the saturated colors of Coney Island amusements, the light in this show feels uncommonly compelling and memorable.
The works in this exhibit mostly comprise street scenes Eddy photographed while taking lengthy walks throughout New York City during the early days of that city’s Covid lockdown. “Because of lockdown, New York was an empty city,” Eddy told me. “I’d go on epic walks of 15 miles around the city. I felt like the city became mine. Lockdown allowed me to go places that you just wouldn’t go. I went to places that would have been too dangerous, really unusual places, really industrial, really downtrodden.”
The result of Eddy’s Covid-era walks are striking works that at times feel reminiscent of Andreas Gursky’s massively compressed exercises in controlled chaos. For instance, Sea Side Swing – one-half Coney Island dreamscape, one-half graffiti smorgasbord – appears impossibly full of detail, from line after line of rollercoaster metal girders to jagged, packed-together letters of spray-painted tags. His Daughter Light/Daughter Bright is a similarly lush concatenation of Coney Island forms packed to a density that boggles the eye.
Other works here showcase Eddy’s eye for found forms. For instance, Metal City II shows an industrial landscape full of heavy machinery, while three insets running along the canvas’s bottom show zoomed-in details of machinery, their many interlocking lines and curves taking on the feeling of an abstraction. Similarly MAP II’s abstract composition loses nothing from its instant recognizability as the tracks of a rollercoaster – the layers of repeated lines in shades of off-white set against a pale blue sky comes across as oddly calming and ends up making the thousands of pounds of metal feel as light as the passage of clouds.
For Eddy, the particular texture of these canvases very much came out of the eerie feelings that existed during the early Covid period, when he would discover strange versions of beauty amid immense loss and disintegration. “The Japanese have a phrase called ‘mono no aware’,” he said, “and what that refers to is the beauty of decrepitness in a way. And so, that sense of poignancy, of things falling apart was riveting to me under the situation of 45,000 people dying in the city.”
Contrasting these metal-filled works are a number of paintings of flowers, as simple and pliable as the others are dense and unyielding. “We went through summer, fall, winter in this grim lockdown situation,” Eddy said, “and then in spring the Covid numbers went down, and the flowers bloomed. I had this tremendous sense of renewal happening.” As the flowers demonstrate, although Eddy is widely known for his cityscapes that delve into environments that humans have constructed from materials like steel and concrete, nature is also present in his work, and he considers it to be an essential aspect. “The natural elements are really important to me as a counteracting device to the rigidity,” he said.
The show at Nancy Hoffman Gallery comprises over a dozen cityscapes, but there are no humans to be seen anywhere. This was very purposeful on Eddy’s part. “There’s not a single person in these paintings. If there was anyone in the photographs, I take them out. I’m not completely sure why, I guess I want the only person in the painting to be me.” The depopulation of these paintings underscores the tension between nature and the artificial environment, and also heightens the “beauty in decrepitude” that Eddy sees as integral to this exhibition.
As a painter Eddy has a long history, first coming to prominence in the 1970s while associated with painters labeled photorealists, or hyperrealists. He honed the photographic eye that would become a linchpin of his art while working as a tourist photographer in his 20s. “I became so familiar with the camera that it was just my way of seeing,” he said. Eddy also believes that his photographic way of seeing the world is a product of the generation he grew up in. “I would contend that I’m one of the first generations to really live the world through photography, cinema, television,” he said.
Although Eddy does work from photographs in order to create his paintings, he subtly manipulates them with computer software in order to engineer effects that would not be possible otherwise. “Once I photograph the imagery, I tend to manipulate it a fair amount to get what I want. Especially in my cityscapes, the verticals are always parallel to the picture plane, whereas they should by laws of perspective eventually come together. That’s meant to create an echo with the rectangular or square surface.” Eddy also added that he often manipulates a photo’s color in order to get effects that are more evocative of his experience of a setting, rather than just what the photograph captured. This, arguably gives his works a sense of hyperrealism – subtly augmented reality that comes off as slightly more exuberant, massive, complex and colorful than the materials that inspire him.
For Eddy, painting fundamentally goes back to capturing experience. One might even argue that, for an artist like him, the subject of the work is second to it being a vehicle for exploring the artist’s means of apprehending the world. “In a way, the imagery is nothing more than a receptacle for light and color,” he said. “That’s really what I’m getting at. I’m getting at the transformation quality of light and color.”
Although Eddy’s works appear impossibly lifelike and detailed, they are less about depicting reality as it is than about depicting reality as filtered through the human brain. It is a delicious irony of his work that the photographer’s lens is his method for doing so. “I’m trying to get at the nature of experience,” he said. “Most of my paintings are multiple panel paintings. My contention is that we never see the world singularly – it’s an artificial construction of moving in space over time. What I’m trying to get at is the intensity of my lived experience in the world. It’s a long way from what the camera can do.”
Don Eddy is showing at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York until 9 December
