Heaven Beneath You as an Abyss

“The image escapes me, and this tortures me, only when my mind clears completely do I feel happy again…clouds raced over the moon; now total darkness, now the elusive foggy landscape reappears in the moonshine…” —Georg Büchner, excerpt from Lenz Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella Lenz describes the wanderings of the writer Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz through the bucolic mountains of Alsace. Experiencing the onset of acute schizophrenia, Lenz’ perception of his natural environment seems to fluctuate and alter in accord with the intensity of his own psychological state. Nate Boyce’s second exhibition at Lomex, Heaven Beneath You as an Abyss, consists of a video installation and a suite of new paintings. Boyce’s video work, Rapid Countenance, features a series of characters that have been procedurally generated from images drawn from 1980s cartoons and from historic literary texts like Büchner’s. Often appearing in the throes of some sort of psychic episode, these characters are cast into a refracted video taken in the gallery itself. The characters flash in and out of view alongside repeating gestural marks that trace across the screen like fragments of abstract paintings. The footage varies in its structure at the whims of a computer program devised by Boyce, and the images evolve and recur for an infinite duration. The work exists both as a generated record of the interaction between Boyce’s program and the gallery, as well as an adaptive installation which can incorporate a live feed of any physical space into its algorithm. Rapid Countenance is accompanied by a new series of paintings done on raw aluminum. Made in oil and inscribed with a die grinder, they are made through repetitive mark making that mirrors the movements of the rotoscoped characters in Boyce’s video work. The images are smeared to reiterate their unstable temporal nature. Their surfaces have been etched into in a manner that indexes their own velocity. Rapid Countenance furthers Boyce’s exploration of the aesthetic passage from Romantic idealism to procedural nihilism. Boyce radicalizes this through repetitive gestures that push his figures into abstraction.