Frank Holliday "Wish You Were Here"

Swivel Gallery is proud to present “Wish You Were Here”, the first solo exhibition of Frank Holliday with the gallery, debuting his vigorous new body of work that encapsulates the viewer in its potency, bringing together a suite of paintings the artist has catalyzed over the past two years. For Frank Holliday, painting becomes a vector to create epic metaphors of human existence, before morphing into language and rational formulation. Through a simple remedy of material, paint and canvas, abstraction becomes complex, a way to explore the infinite possibilities of expression of both colors and the body beyond any existing linguistic codes, a signatory that pushes, pulls, and encapsulates the viewer in its singularity. It has, if done properly, the ability to have a plethora of effects on the viewer, one of a shiver, of joy, of contemplation; its consequences contain multitudes.

Bursting with vibrant colors and animated by contrasts, Holliday’s paintings fully embrace the idea of élan vital explored by Henri Bergson in which the vital force, a principle of creativity immanent in all organisms, is considered responsible for a continuous evolution. This élan vital penetrates the painting tides as they flood the canvas almost instinctively, amounting to an unexpected and uncontrolled evolution on the surface. In Holliday’s work, one finds a difficult task to gather its beginning, or its end. Connecting the psychic and somatic levels, Holliday's recent abstraction seems to mount a spectacle of evanescent floating bodies, embodied in the kaleidoscopic texture of densely intricate layers of colors. These flaming canvases offer the same surrender to sensations experienced in extremely intense life moments as sex, deep pain, and death. Simultaneously connecting us deeper to our bodies, bringing us closer to certain realms, beyond the physically tangible. It is simply an arrival, akin to a peak mushroom trip, a moment of clarity that one does not work towards but rather appears once vulnerable, a culmination of existence that ends with a summation in an instant.

Exploring the chiasma between eyes and the gaze, body and perception, the artist delivers himself, his body to the canvas, engaging in an arbitrary exploration of the physical, psychological and symbolic manifestation of colors in motion. Any distinction between figure and background is eliminated in powerful gestures. It questions the relationship between possession and dispossession, adherence and distance, that characterizes the experience of our body in relation to others and with the world as Merleau-Ponty theorized. A certain tension between ascendant and descendant currents of color can be felt, as an expression of an inescapable dynamic balance between the positive and negative forces that comprise the cosmos. Approaching the canvas as a heterogeneous space, Holliday’s painting fumbles and searches in this limbo between hell and paradise, eros and thanatos, ecstasy and suffering.

Hailing from New York’s Lower East Side 1980’s club scene at the center of Club57, Holliday transfers subconscious memories and intense feelings of an entire era, from rebellious vitality, free sexual expression, to the sense of dramatic loss caused by the HIV/AIDS epidemic on his canvases. In the horror vacui of Holliday’s comprehensive canvases, art becomes an "organ of revelation of the absolute”. Infinity and creativity are rendered explicit, transcending the human limit of ordinary perception, delivering to us the intangible, something that is embedded in our being that we in today’s world, cannot grasp. It is a fleeting moment, like the wind, and we, as the viewer, are responsible to hold onto it as long as we can.