THE WALL: ELIOT GREENWALD
Almine Rech is pleased to present “The Wall“ by the artist Eliot Greenwald at their gallery in Brussels.
January 18 – February 24, 2024
Within the irregular curved shapes of Eliot Greenwald’s paintings are captivating landscapes filled with improbable plant formations, doubled planets in the sky, and the body of a car that stretches and morphs. For Greenwald’s latest body of ‘Night Car’ paintings, however, a new structure emerges, Flabby Saturn, a stationary structure resembling the colossal planet Saturn which seems to have lost its traditional spherical shape with a ring and become less certain. This structure has been removed from the cosmos, entangled with flora, and therefore married with the landscape itself. All that is witnessed or imagined is vulnerable to drastic reevaluation.
This new addition to his imagined world, in the form of ‘Flabby Saturn’, revealed itself to Greenwald during a time of intense introspection. Through drawing intuitively, he created some sketches of what the highly characterized and distinct planet, Saturn, would look like if it were scientifically reinterpreted and found to be shaped quite unlike any other cosmic body.
Fascinated by the complexity of natural phenomena and the astounding regenerative qualities of human perception, he began exploring the visual representation of this absurd idea.
Additionally, in works such as Understudy (1-4), he offers a perspective that has not been seen before. Tree tops create a dense canopy line that seems to bisect the canvas completely, obstructing the connection between land and sky. The disconnection represented in these works contrasts the entanglement represented in others.
Greenwald’s unusual educational background, far off the beaten path of art history, reflects an interest in traditional areas of study but decidedly lands in a place that values the ocean of collective imagination equally to that of rigorous traditional modes education. In this way, Greenwald has decided to distance himself from pre-established labels, preferring to ground his work in a solid conceptual approach that is the product of synergy between art and science, creating a portal to worlds both familiar and uncertain.