Pitted

Across Eric Uhlir’s current body of work, he uses abstraction to examine the lines between art historical reference and this lived history in an attempt to name and give voice to the conflicted spaces we currently inhabit. References to the environment, art and human history all take center stage across the large, vibrant paintings.

Systematic mark making and spontaneity find equal footing. References are not secret but the condition of the work. Irreverence and crushing absurdity battle amid parables of human and natural history. Crises of our own making — cultural, political, and environmental — face off in Uhlir’s current bodies of work. Even sports, an ongoing fixation of civilization’s long march, finds a home here.

Much like the human systems of invention and destruction, each painting is built up through additive mark making and reductive methods like scraping, drawing or the application of solvents as Uhlir embraces spontaneity and uses physical processes to reflect on the nature of the paint. This physicality breathes life into the pictorial space and helps the viewer connect to subjects of human sexuality, our degradation of the natural environment and the human preoccupation with idealized visions of a natural world we are quickly ushering towards destruction. It is this lopsided pursuit of utopias and Arcadian virtue by a select few that jeopardizes the future well being of all living creatures.