Logan Sylve | Guitar Sounds
ON VIEW
September 30 - October 18, 2022
RECEPTION
Friday, September 30, 6-9pm
LOCATION
413 West Broadway
New York, NY
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Logan Sylve (b. 1995, New Orleans) is a New York-based American contemporary painter and illustrator. Growing up in Louisiana, Sylve began creating art at an early age. Entirely self-taught, Sylve has amassed a large international following of loyal fans and collectors. Sylve read comics such as “Wolverine” and “The Maxx,” finding inspiration in the visual dialogue of comic book art. Sylve lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Sylve’s work explores transitional states through the study of living and non-living forms. Human, animal, and spectral beings exist in solitude and together, conveying the complexity of human behavior and connection. Often frenetic, the figures encapsulate the cycle of life through motion - to be alive - and stillness - death - as well as the in-between.
Recognized for recurring motifs of teeth, eyes, and grinning characters, Sylve blends elements of surrealism, expressionism, illustration, and animation in his prolific oeuvre using paint, ink, pencil, and sgraffito. Sylve’s characters are recurring and unique, evolving from the artist’s visual dialog as a way to depict alter egos. The style incorporates elements of classical Western American imagery and animated cartoons, while staying true to anatomical structure. His visual cues to pop culture allow viewers to find their own point of reference.
Sylve concentrates his choice of color palette to evoke certain moods, depicting figures in earthen tones, gray-scale, blues, and reds. His “Pink” series focuses on retreat and metamorphosis. Figures shed their skin, revealing their skeletal selves and innermost form. The attention to anatomy reveals Sylve’s intense study and dedication to his craft. It also exposes the fetishization of certain body parts in Western culture, imploring the viewer to question their own relationship with their body and environment.
Chase Contemporary is proud to present an exhibition of new work by the New York-based painter Logan Sylve. The exhibition will present a new series of large-scale canvases and works on paper created primarily over the span of three months. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Friday, September 30th from 6-9 pm at 413 West Broadway in Soho, New York.
The title Guitar Sounds is a reminder of the inseparable relationship between music and painting for the artist. Over the course of the three month period in which Sylve created this body of work, he practiced guitar and listened to rock music frequently. It is from these sounds that the paintings emerge. For Sylve, music creates the arena from which the imagined scenarios and characters depicted in his work materialize.
Sylve is a self-taught artist who draws inspiration from cartoons, comic books, and popular culture. With a style reminiscent of English painter Francis Bacon, Sylve’s direct, graphic, and intense canvases make the fluidity and volatility of human emotion apparent in every brushstroke. Although primarily a figurative painter, Sylve’s works are more accurately characterized as psychological impressions of an emotional or physical state, usually one of pain, confusion, loss or distress. His process is highly experimental and intuitive, and the scene in each piece is developed in tandem with the artist’s own feelings. His human, animal, and spectral subjects exist in solitude and together, conveying the complexity of human behavior and connection. Vulnerable yet masked, his figures grin out at us with wide faces and large teeth and eyes that seem to conceal much more than they reveal about the true nature of the subjects.
Sylve’s works on paper similarly depict imagined characters, yet they are distinct from the artist’s large canvases in their tone and mood. Often more subdued than his brash, dynamic canvas works, the artist remarks that his pencil drawings represent ideas that are more refined and developed, while the canvas works are typically more intuitive and exploratory. In both cases, Sylve is continually attempting to accurately represent the scenes that appear in his imagination. He remarks, “I keep painting to capture what I saw.”
Growing up in Louisiana, Sylve began creating art at an early age. Entirely self-taught, he has amassed a large international following of loyal fans and collectors. Sylve read comics such as “Wolverine” and “The Maxx,” finding inspiration in the visual dialogue of comic book art. This is his second solo exhibition with Chase Contemporary. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
