James Hyde — À propos — Slash Paris

Over the last decade Hyde has developed a paradigm of painting — different modes of painting on photographic prints — that forms a distinct but continuous relationship to his earlier painterly explorations of image and support, material and surface.

In the large paintings on view simple geometry and bright flat colors emphatically occupy large panoramic landscapes. Hyde photographed the area around Pyramid Lake fifty miles northeast of Los Angeles over several days in 2009 and 2011. In these paintings, geometric bands to divide and frame the photographic surfaces, at times enhancing the stretch of a panorama, other times creating a mutually reinforcing coincidence of photographic detail and pigment.

Hyde’s new paintings employ photographs as the physical ground to paint on. Although Hyde’s photographs are highly technical and detailed, the images are less important than their embodiment of the photographic condition. For Hyde, photography represents a mnemonic index of the world. The photographic record holds a moment of time, a fragment of a view onto the world. This is the location that Hyde’s paintings take place. Hyde embraces photography as context and subject for painting. His painterly geometry exists independently, but in dynamic relation to his photographs.

Hyde has written :

“Looking at the large detailed photographic prints a visitor asked me why I painted on the photographs. Without reflecting I replied—to make it real. These photos are enormously descriptive—precise in location and moment. Painting, applying color, material and shape on surfaces, constructs a logic and brings the experience of these works into the physical present.”