In anticpation of Gregory Thielker's second solo exhibition opening at Guy Hepner next week, photographer Dave Krugman shares a forward introducing the works:
As a photographer who wanders through the watery worlds of New York City, I know that nothing transforms the night like a veil of rain. Absent of its bright sun, the city holds a muted air that is punctuated by the glows of artificial light. Headlights sweep over slick pavement, incandescent street lamps flicker through the gloom, and windows illuminate the walls of concrete canyons, each glimmer in the darkness another unknown story.
When a storm sweeps through these scenes, this beauty is scattered and amplified, and the oil on linen works of Gregory Thielker hold these moments in time. Art gives us a way to study things that time usually whisks away- the complex beauty of rain on a windshield, its droplets pushed by the wind into long rivulets that wander to the edges of our vision. What is usually gone in an instant is instead held in suspense, and the viewer can luxuriate in these details.
To immortalize something that is usually fleeting, and oft overlooked, is a difficult but worthy pursuit. With “Holding Sway,” for example, our perspective is placed behind a layer of glass, our gaze on the arch of a tunnel, darker still than the surrounding scene, punctuated by the brake lights of hesitant commuters. What could be a moment overlooked by any driver is now at a scale that speaks to the beauty of our in between moments, the places between here and there, where most of life ends up unfolding anyway. “Indefinite Escape” pushed even further into the abstract beauty where water and light collide. This scene is twisted by the collision of elements, nature bends the artificial light into organic shapes and swirls, an almost fractal maze of light and color, with the warped steel of a bridge suspended between two worlds. In contrast, “Constellation” gives us a more clear view of a classic New York avenue, broken into the smooth unfocused circles of distant city lights that illuminate the darkness of the island at the center of the world.
The Liquid Night succeeds because it takes moments that most would never think twice about and makes them into scenes that can’t be ignored. That conversion is transportive and moving, and compresses whole worlds into microcosms, each canvas a universe in a droplets of rain. To stop time in this way and allow the viewer to become lost in a landscape of color and water is no easy task, but a gift to a considerate observer. I myself have spent hours pouring over the details- and emerged even more in love with the rain soaked beautify of New York City at night.
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Dave Krugman is a New York based photographer, writer, and the founder of ALLSHIPS, a culture company based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Read the complete conversation between Thielker and Krugman here.
