Drama Gallery presents ‘90% Stick 10% Mystic’ a solo exhibition by Jonas Kyle
260 Moore St. #403
Contact info: Dramagallery403@gmail.com
720-539-6222
90% Stick 10% Mystic by Jonas Kyle
Drama Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of paintings by Jonas Kyle. Well, not paintings: tape-ings. Kyle, a tape connoisseur, has collected tapes from all over the world, and particularly in Germany. “Going in, you have to have some idea of what you want to do,” Kyle says, but a fair amount of improvisation is involved. Clear tapes cross over solid ones to create lighter shades, textured tapes fall over shiny ones, and vice versa. The edges are straight, but the lines are slanted. The patterns play with symmetry and asymmetry. Strips are cut out of strips and laid over other strips; as Kyle says, it is a surgical operation.
This dry-taping technique takes up a battle begun in the sixties with artists like Frank Stella and the painters of the Washington Color School: It’s the hard, straight line, over and against stroke-and-splatter culture, against “splotching paint around”, which Kyle finds “gross,” “squishy,” and, oftentimes, “falsely expressive.” But where for these painters, tape was a help meet, a means to a line, here, the tape becomes the line itself. At the same time tape is more vulnerable on a canvas than paint. Taking on the primary role, its ephemerality becomes the subject of the work of art. Piet Mondrian – who, with his highly ordered vision of natural harmony, is in many ways the patron saint of this project – also tried to use tape this way in his last paintings. But Kyle has done him one better, since a century of innovation in tape-making has supplied him with “a vast array of better tapes.”
Since Duchamp, the use of mundane materials, the transfiguration of the commonplace, has been a source of inspiration. Tape’s a role in freight and shipping gives it the added valence of a kind of angel or a messenger. Kyle’s tape-ings are as much an earnest call-back to Mondrian and his progeny as they are a paean to plaid and packaging, wherever they appear among the intersecting lines of modern life: Amazon package strollers, gingham tablecloths, skyscraper facades, the history of the lumber-jacket. It’s a tape-based way of looking at the world.