Austin Eddy: Above The House Where Paul Verlaine Died
At the end of Ernest Hemingway's 1936 short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the dying narrator reminisces on his time in Paris, lingering fondly on the details of the urban environment: sprawling trees, old white plastered houses, smooth asphalt under bicycle tires, and the “cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died.” The way that these concrete objective details conjure up a certain subjective mood—a poignant intermingling of bliss and doom—helps guide us toward understanding the artistic ideas we find in the work by Austin Eddy, whose title alludes to this literary moment.
Eddy explains that his work takes an emotional observation—a subjective sense of what it is like to be in a certain time and place with certain people (what philosophers refer to as ‘qualia’)—and explores how to recreate or transcribe that observation by means of blocking out shapes and colors. What was it like for Hemingway’s narrator Harry to remember Paris, lying sick on his cot in the last days of his life? That is the kind of feeling that Eddy’s work might elicit in its viewers.
To this end, the elegant birds here appear less the way a scientist would see them (documenting wingspan, plumage, etc.) than as emblems of personhood. These birds are beings who see, feel, sleep, nest, couple and sing, much the way Emily Dickinson visualized hope as a thing with feathers, that sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all. The poetic nature of Eddy’s work can be gauged from the importance of references to the Symbolist poet Verlaine (1844-1896) and particularly his 1866 collection Poems under Saturn. For example, looking at Twilight and Memory might send a viewer back to Verlaine’s luscious, suffocating poem, translated by Karl Kirchwey as “Mystical Dusk,” in which the “heavy, hot smells” of dahlia, tulip, buttercup and lily, drown the narrator’s senses, spirit and reason “in a single immense swoon, Twilight together with Memory”—an overpowering emotional experience.
Throughout Eddy’s work here, the intensity of the visual forms is heightened by simplification. In Twilight and Memory and other works, the bird-form is indicated economically by a set of graphic elements (circles, ovals, dots, hatches, straight lines), reducing it to essentials. At the same time, the surrounding space is flattened, and the background scale equalized, in Cubist fashion. Eddy explains that, whether working with pencil, ink, oil stick, or paintbrush, all of his work partakes of the same fundamental visual practice—of working out how the shapes and colors all come together in a unified whole.
In an age of COVID confinement, the image of avian liberty must be particularly welcome—see it here, for instance, among In Flight Aloft Dutchman’s Landing, or Beyond the Sea. That sense of subjective freedom, unbound by weight, comes across well in classic bird poems such as Gerald Manley Hopkins’s Windhover, or Tennyson’s Eagle. But in Eddy’s work, the soaring ecstasy is also shadowed by melancholy—whether explicitly, in The Cage that Failed You and the view of Verlaine’s death-house, or more implicitly, in the dark shadows that lurk around the edges. With poetic virtuosity, Eddy’s work, like Verlaine’s, uses the world of tangible surface and sensation to take us beyond itself, into the shadowy, elusive world of interior feeling.
- By Ben Lima
This marks Austin Eddy’s first exhibition with 12.26. Eddy was born in 1986 in Boston, MA, US, currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US. He earned his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Selected Poems Eva Presenhuber. New York, NY; A Place for Dreams, Berggruen Gallery, San Fransico, CA; Seeuferweg at Livie Fine Art, Zurich, CH (2021); Light Reflecting Distance at The Pit, Los Angeles, CA, US (2021); Birds At Night at Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam, NL (2020); Cold On The 4th Of July at Institute 193 B, New York, NY, US (2020); and The Poet And The Muse at Knust Kunz, Munich, DE (2020). In the coming year, a monograph of the artist’s practice will be published in conjunction with Knust Kunz, Munich.
Eddy explains that his work takes an emotional observation—a subjective sense of what it is like to be in a certain time and place with certain people (what philosophers refer to as ‘qualia’)—and explores how to recreate or transcribe that observation by means of blocking out shapes and colors. What was it like for Hemingway’s narrator Harry to remember Paris, lying sick on his cot in the last days of his life? That is the kind of feeling that Eddy’s work might elicit in its viewers.
To this end, the elegant birds here appear less the way a scientist would see them (documenting wingspan, plumage, etc.) than as emblems of personhood. These birds are beings who see, feel, sleep, nest, couple and sing, much the way Emily Dickinson visualized hope as a thing with feathers, that sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all. The poetic nature of Eddy’s work can be gauged from the importance of references to the Symbolist poet Verlaine (1844-1896) and particularly his 1866 collection Poems under Saturn. For example, looking at Twilight and Memory might send a viewer back to Verlaine’s luscious, suffocating poem, translated by Karl Kirchwey as “Mystical Dusk,” in which the “heavy, hot smells” of dahlia, tulip, buttercup and lily, drown the narrator’s senses, spirit and reason “in a single immense swoon, Twilight together with Memory”—an overpowering emotional experience.
Throughout Eddy’s work here, the intensity of the visual forms is heightened by simplification. In Twilight and Memory and other works, the bird-form is indicated economically by a set of graphic elements (circles, ovals, dots, hatches, straight lines), reducing it to essentials. At the same time, the surrounding space is flattened, and the background scale equalized, in Cubist fashion. Eddy explains that, whether working with pencil, ink, oil stick, or paintbrush, all of his work partakes of the same fundamental visual practice—of working out how the shapes and colors all come together in a unified whole.
In an age of COVID confinement, the image of avian liberty must be particularly welcome—see it here, for instance, among In Flight Aloft Dutchman’s Landing, or Beyond the Sea. That sense of subjective freedom, unbound by weight, comes across well in classic bird poems such as Gerald Manley Hopkins’s Windhover, or Tennyson’s Eagle. But in Eddy’s work, the soaring ecstasy is also shadowed by melancholy—whether explicitly, in The Cage that Failed You and the view of Verlaine’s death-house, or more implicitly, in the dark shadows that lurk around the edges. With poetic virtuosity, Eddy’s work, like Verlaine’s, uses the world of tangible surface and sensation to take us beyond itself, into the shadowy, elusive world of interior feeling.
- By Ben Lima
This marks Austin Eddy’s first exhibition with 12.26. Eddy was born in 1986 in Boston, MA, US, currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US. He earned his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Selected Poems Eva Presenhuber. New York, NY; A Place for Dreams, Berggruen Gallery, San Fransico, CA; Seeuferweg at Livie Fine Art, Zurich, CH (2021); Light Reflecting Distance at The Pit, Los Angeles, CA, US (2021); Birds At Night at Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam, NL (2020); Cold On The 4th Of July at Institute 193 B, New York, NY, US (2020); and The Poet And The Muse at Knust Kunz, Munich, DE (2020). In the coming year, a monograph of the artist’s practice will be published in conjunction with Knust Kunz, Munich.