The Soil’s Gaze at Tyger Tyger Gallery
Chris Jehly’s solo exhibition at Tyger Tyger Gallery of plein-air watercolor landscapes, The Soil’s Gaze, unveils the artist’s serendipitous moments painting outdoors where nothing ever stands completely still. Sunbeams cut through descending fog, breezes move through undulating mountain foliage, and fallen trees nestle deeper into the damp earth. Within these constantly shifting spaces, Jehly makes quick decisions, building kaleidoscopic images dense with color-shifting ribbons of light and form. Whether hiking to secluded destinations in the Blue Ridge Mountains or painting the view from his grandmother’s front yard, Jehly remains present and curious, letting his environment guide his painting process. “Plein-air painting is about being vulnerable physically, mentally, and creatively,” Jehly says. “My approach is both reckless and ephemeral, fueling spontaneity and mark-making that would otherwise be overly edited.”
After living in Brooklyn for 11 years, Chris relocated to Asheville 3 years ago. Like so many of us, the pandemic marked a major turn in his life and work, where the imagery, materials, and the studio space itself pivoted. “This is the most experiential work that I’ve made, and it’s literally all I can think about; what will be the discovery on my next hike, what will the birds, trees and silence whisper? It wasn’t until I moved to Asheville that I rediscovered my love for hiking and camping, but never had any previous thoughts of engaging with landscape the way I have recently. In the past I’ve predominantly worked in a trauma-cartoonish-surreal psychedelic mode where every bit of space was occupied by hammers, twine, melted figures adorned with lacy socks and combat boots. Everything was personified, stacked on a shelf, half-forgotten and re-lived upon every viewing.” While Jehly’s turn towards plein-air landscape painting may seem like a turning away from the tangled, emotionally fraught energy of his earlier work, there is an undeniable throughline of delirious, shape-shifting, mood-rich presence that connects everything he makes. His childhood obsessions with cartoons and comic books and a background in graffiti, mural painting and printmaking continue to inform his approach and execution, as evidenced in patterns within meticulous channels of negative space that contain the forms rather than allowing them to spill into one another, unlike traditional plein-air painting approaches.
Keeping the pigment concentrated, Jehly disrupts its desire to bleed and flow within the defined shadows on delicate leaves or gray clouds thick with water droplets. He compresses space and saturates the atmosphere with hard edges and wildly dense striations found in his encounters in the woods, especially off the beaten path of a hiking trail. Paintings like "Tree Throw," "The Soil’s Gaze," and "Awaken Slow Glow" place the viewer right up against the open mouth of where roots meet, tear away from, and weave into the soil. Here, fallen trees expose their red earth-coated guts and block us from the spaces beyond. Jehly delights in the geometry of overlapping and woven branches, finding himself through allowing the environment to pierce beyond the retinal and into the auric. Emotion has not left his work- instead, it is subversively present, implicit rather than explicit- whispering in surround sound with a strong heartbeat and undulating wind in the trees and grasses.
Jehly’s transcendent landscapes conjure the pulsating, revelatory paintings of Paul Nash and Chiura Obata- two artists who are immensely influential to him. Their work hums with the energy of the world both outdoors and within as pigment turns to air and cold-pressed paper to earth. Jehly’s work edges towards fairy-tale territory at times with paintings like "Woodpecker Monolith" and "Light’s Last Gasp" as hard-edged shafts of sunlight playfully criss-cross with branches and fragments of sky. "The In-Between" and "Passage," among others, give a nod to the deliriously joyful, cathedral-esque forest watercolors of Charles E. Burchfield. Burchfield and Jehly easily transform a neighborhood view, a walk in the woods, or a mountain landscape to a vision rippling with clairvoyance where invisible energies are made visible.
The Soil’s Gaze takes the viewer by the hand and brings them to the artist’s sacred locations, allowing them to feel the heartbeat of the surroundings and breathe alongside the exhaling trees. “These works traverse notions of what it means to be accurate, what can be abstracted, and plumbing the authenticity of experience,” Jehly explains. “The paintings aren’t necessarily a direct representation of the visual landscape, but rather incorporate the sounds of the environment, insects, my own body; the smells and changes in temperature and air pressure; the sense that I am a cell within a larger, living organism.”
About the Artist:
Chris Jehly was born in Santa Rosa, CA and is now based in Asheville, NC. He received his BA in printmaking at Sonoma State University in 2006 and MFA in printmaking from Columbia University in 2011.
Jehly has exhibited throughout California, New York, and Asheville as well as internationally in
Amsterdam and China. He participated in the Bosch Young Talent Show in Hertogenbosch,
Netherlands in 2011 and the Japan Foundation cultural exchange residency in 2015.
