Darrell Nettles
Broken
Verse
June 4 – July 3, 2015
The
paintings by Darrell Nettles in Broken
Verse are ergodic in the deepest and most satisfying sense of the word:
although they require a great deal of effort to unlock their secrets, the
engagement they demand makes an encounter with them a rich and rewarding
experience. Nettles’ linguistic impressionism employs the gravid ambiguity of language to reveal its deeper
treasures; his visual meditations on the images and sounds of human
communication owe as much to Klee and Kandinsky’s conflations of visual and
musical composition as they do to
the playful semantic games championed by the wordsmiths of Dada, Fluxus, and
Pop.
Broken Verse
is anchored by a
series seven-foot-tall canvases arrayed
edge to edge with
dense pseudo-cryptographic patterns of thin block letters that are tightly
juxtaposed and overlapped on soft-edged crossword puzzle grids. Elements have been added, effaced, and replaced
into dense palimpsests; words emerge and sounds arise as the eye follows its own
course. An underlying architectonic uniformity hints at a clandestine dialogue
between the canvases. They speak from their own side with the
compelling but exasperating self-assertion found in ancient cyphers and obscure
old alchemical engravings.
In his most recent paintings, Nettles has gravitated toward
texts that are more immediately legible on first glance, yet ultimately no less
mysterious. Snippets of conversation torn from everyday life run from top to
bottom in a font that recalls hand-stenciled shop signs; disjunctions and
deliberate sidetracks are the mortar that holds them together.
Phrases are stacked, clashed, amputated, and sometimes ripped apart and
scattered chaotically. The resulting bits of quasi-proclamation and
pseudo-communication are both sinister and amusing by turns, calling to mind the
gentle snark of Ed Ruscha’s late-1970s word pastels: “drug allergy fake” loiters just far enough from “radical wonton” to establish
plausible deniability. Ghostly snippets of text murmur faintly in the
background like a mildly sarcastic chorus, echoing, multiplying, and subverting
surface meanings (is that “permit tonight” or “hermit night”?). Behind
the chatter’s misdirection is the nagging sense of a deeper significance that
awaits excavation and exegesis. Nettles’ works dare us to acknowledge the
primal and sometimes neurotic need we have to make sense of it all, and the
magical ability that language has to both fulfill and thwart that need.
For further information, please contact 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel by phone at 1.917.701.3338, or by e-mail at info@532gallery.com