LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 2020 – Keystone Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by three emerging artists engaged in defining and further complicating the legacy of American landscape painting. Centering on their responses to decay and alienation in the Anthropocene era, Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent features works of art by Los Angeles-based artists Henry Landes Bell, Lee Piechocki, and Julian Tan. Devoutly rendered, exquisite and sometimes tender meditations on an increasingly precarious world, the work exhibited in Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent reexamines misled nineteenth century artistic ideals of growth and national identity as defined by the Hudson River School. 

The Hudson River school has withered under the contemporary lens. The large and central ugliness of its relationship to Imperialism and its financial backing resting securely in the pockets of the railroad tycoons and land speculators which abetted and often encouraged the invasion of the westward reaches of the continent has dimmed its prestige. Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent takes on the concepts held dear among the ranks of the Hudson River School and positions the work of Bell, Piechocki and Tan within the same framework in order to create a reflexive discourse. The Hudson River School systematically worked to forge a sense of national and cultural identity through the elevation of the American landscape into the sublime. Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent asks what these rigorous methodologies of observation and rendering can highlight in terms of our relationship to both the ideals of the past and the realities of our present environment. 

In his paintings, Henry Landes Bell presents striking and dutifully rendered views of the passage of time on human-made spaces. In describing his own work, Bell aims to investigate “the meanings in the process of things moving beyond meaningfulness”. In a larger context, Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent asserts an investigation into the repercussions surrounding the pathology of manifest destiny as it has passed through many destructive phases leading it into the present moment. With eighteen new paintings presented, each artist in their own way discusses the role of representational painting in the face of an increasingly volatile world. 

OPENING RECEPTION 

An opening reception for Reverent Revenant Remnant Referent will take place on Saturday, January 18, 2020 from 6:00-10:00PM. The reception is open to the public.