Notes from the Air

DC Moore Gallery, New York

July 14 – October 3, 2020

This new body of work continues to explore Waterston’s interest in painting states of consciousness using landscape as metaphor and as poetic space. The exhibition title is taken from a volume of selected late poems by John Ashbery, one of America’s great visionary poets who is an important influence on his work. These paintings depict other worldly spaces, twilight, a destabilized reality, nature as a heady fever-dream teeming with quiet activity: moon-lit as the Cyclops dreams. While developing this new work, Waterston was also looking closely at the work of the Hercules Segers, Max Ernst and Odilon Redon.

Waterston often starts out constructing a painterly description of space and spatiality, which may include sky, clouds, rocky cliffs, a verdant glade but with every descriptive execution there is always the counterpart of abstraction and playful distortion of what is being depicted. Shifting perceptions, deformation and the Surrealist impulse are always there. He also experimented with scale and how to create the sense of depth or vastness on a relatively small panel.