Dashiell Manley at Jessica Silverman Gallery

This body of work by Dashiell Manley places itself firmly into a tradition of meditative painting.  This body of work boasts two primary marks made, a short, considered mark that offers a repetition that allows the artist to meditate while working, the other being a longer mark, made on top of the shorter marks and penetrating the thick paint, a sign of broken concentration.  It is the re-enactment of a seminal part of the artists culture (he is half Japanese, and half Irish-American), re-imagined through the lens of western abstraction.  The thick paint and obvious brush strokes harken back to modernist abstract artists like Lee Krasner who regularly utilized a heavy application.   The colors reference another movement, specifically the neo-geo movement of the 1980's and their often bright and intense palettes.  It is the combination (re-mix) of these art historical styles, the appropriating of specific aspects of several cultural (that the artist can claim as their own) movements that Manley arrives at these paintings that celebrate the legacy of painting, and historical methods of Japanese art making.