The continuity between lime plaster and cinema may not be evident to most, but to artist Anthony Chase—a filmmaker-turned-craftsman-turned-painter—the process of plaster has undeniably cinematic resonance. The paintings in Chase’s show “Patina” (on view at Hawk + Hive gallery in Andes and at Chase’s Delhi studio August 3 through September 1) offer layers of plaster colored with earth pigments and marble dust, troweled, combed, shaped, smoothed, and polished. The South African-born artist describes these pieces as “unfinished film scripts” that communicate their stories through the medium of texture.
The abstract compositions that make up “Patina” put forth a deceptively simple beauty. In Rendezvous, yellow and white cup-shaped forms overlap each other suggestively; in Nova, black-tinted plaster grounds a planetary disc, burnished to an ebony shine. Underlying the seeming austerity of these pieces, however, is the sensibility of an artist with a lifelong fascination with spaces and the stories they tell. After growing up in Cape Town, Chase traveled widely, moving to New York City in 1983. Along the way, he developed an affinity for old walls, from the adobe walls of Swaziland to city walls in Vietnam to lime plaster walls in Umbria. The witness borne by these walls—the way the passage of time is visible on their surfaces—stayed with the artist.
As an aspiring filmmaker in New York in the 1980s, Chase became immersed in the worlds of downtown performance, installation, and conceptual art. He began doing decorative interior painting and Venetian plastering as a livelihood. Over time, he transferred his passion for the plaster process from interior walls to the imaginative space of painting. He moved full-time to Delhi in 2019 with his wife, Nini Ordoubadi, setting up a studio in the cavernous space of his nineteenth-century barn.
The works in “Patina” make for a stunning culmination of these narrative arcs, using an archaeological instinct to invite viewers into the history of a surface. Chase deploys a vocabulary of textures, juxtaposing the luminous beside the gritty, as well as a recurring set of spatialized forms, like the horse harness shape that appears in Oracle and Harbored, or the silhouettes of planets and crescents that emerge from monochrome grounds. Viewers will be reminded of the lush minimalism of Robert Ryman and Yun Hyong-Kuen. I myself was brought back to Anselm Kiefer’s palettes and Ad Reinhart’s contemplative planes.
There are several pieces in “Patina” that suggest landscape—Hanoi Cistern, Siena, and Madiba—invitations to vessel edges or windows set within a wall-like expanse. Some pieces contain collaged bits of lichen taken from the woods near the artist’s home. To spend time with these paintings is to meditate on the stories revealed by palimpsests: the history behind the layer that’s on the surface, and the one under that, and so on. The attention to material that Chase conveys in his work is indeed cinematic—searching—and at times even poetic. The love of spaces is translated into a love of plaster (which, as Chase points out, looks 30 percent darker wet than dry), and then translated to an attentive body of work that teaches lookers how to view the spaces of the world.
An opening reception for "Patina" will be held on Saturday, August 3, from 2-6pm at Hawk + Hive, 61 Main Street in Andes. Chase will host an open studio party on Saturday, August 17, from 5:30-9:30pm at 7697 Elk Creek Road in Delhi.
