Eric Mack’s work is in a group show in OHWOW Gallery Los Angeles
Until March 28, 2015.
Finding Comfort in Easy Distinction, 2014
About:
Pain after Heat, 2014.
There has long been a connection between fashion and painting. The most obvious one is the fact that they both fundamentally deal with textiles, from the painter’s canvas and drop cloths to piqued wool or silk jacquard. Eric N. Mack, a New York based artist, stitches together the relationship with found bolts of utilitarian fabrics, shipping blankets and articles of clothing all with sly personal touches and popular references. The cloth is marked by series of dots made by pushing paint through workshop peg boards in what amounts to a rough screen printing process. Unstructured forms are then draped, contorted and pulled into the space using the room as an ever-present third party, in a way that places the paintings and given architecture in constant feedback. Paint splatters and boot prints, both residue of a purposefully messy work process, feel referent to abstract expressionism as do the wavy forms of the roughed edge fabrics themselves. There is something almost human about the curves and unpredictability of the gesture as a whole.
Hard to Find, 2013.
Though Mack laces the paintings with personal bits of ephemera—his own clothing, fabric from a family couch, a hand print—there is also something deeply enigmatic in it, like it wants to tell you something but can’t exactly find the words. The source material comes from an ecstatic process of observation and collection as Mack’s brain makes connections between the disparate objects that float across his field of vision, though the end result is surprisingly unified. All the rolls of fabric, the paint drips and printed grids, inserted clothing, magazine clippings suddenly register into a coherent whole like a dish at a fancy restaurant that elegantly hides the messy network of farm-to-table, turning jumbles of gritty greens and unbutchered meats into something far more vibrant. And, just like that, the dissonance becomes harmony and you understand exactly what the artist is trying to tell you, that he’s been saying it all along, that maybe you already knew. (Harry Gassel on FADER, February/March 2015).
Wind Painting, 2012.
See the interview of him with Eric Mack http://www.thefader.com/2014/06/24/visual-identity-meet-eric-n-mack-the-new-york-artist-breathing-new-life-into-old-clothes
