HIGH TENSION

Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Chinatown Soup is delighted to welcome David West back to our place and his old neighborhood after 20 years of living abroad. High Tension is an exhibition of dry pastel paintings created by the artist since a wild period of experimentation overcame him two years ago, precisely in March 2020. These works are on view at Soup Gallery from March 15 - April 3, 2022 and accompanied by a new, limited edition fine art book called Sforzando—a musical term which signifies ‘sudden emphasis’—that is published by Goswell Road, an independent gallery and publisher based in Paris. Some copies will be available for purchase at Soup Shop.

Please also join us for a short film screening, featuring longtime musician friends and collaborators of David’s, on Thursday, March 24th from 6 to 8pm.

And now, a word from the artist himself—

I’m David West, the artist who made this show.

I was born in 1958, in Detroit. I live in Paris, where life led me 20 years ago. There’s no where else for the moment. I’m ‘old school.’ Archaic. Things are generally made by hand. Drawings and the like. I want to think that I’m not defined by my past or affiliations, but I do have a history, and I own it. The connective tissue between medias I work in is my style.

Under quarantine, I really had to find a different way to work, and most of what you see here is made since March 2020. Stores were closed, I was running out of materials and had to make an order for colors and paper to be delivered, which was going to take weeks. Uncertainty led me to experiment. There was a box of dry pastels of my mother’s from when she was an art student in the early 50’s. They hadn’t been touched since.

Work started developing like passages in music, defined by political changes, different locations in my life like Venice, and jumps in quality of materials with the discovery of ‘La Maison du Pastel’ in the autumn of 2020 and their niceness in sending me some sticks to try. Over time, I found the right papers, the right colors, discovered the techniques to create with the fluidity I’d known with Japanese ink, or other things, so I could flick my wrist and make the movie happen. Really good materials and papers reveal themselves to you and guide you to use them. I developed a new and unique palette.

My work is experiential. The use of color exposes how the piece is meant to affect…perhaps you’ll appreciate that the experience of seeing them live is very different than how they appear on a screen or in a book. I think viewing the stuff directly allows you to see the differences in tone and then in mood, as color pushes you in one direction or another.

Big factors in this body of work were two extended residencies in Venice, in 2018 and 2020, and, if I’m being honest, the separation from my son. Both of those things permeated every aspect of my life, from my dreams to my solitary existence.

There was a period where I was really emotionally crazy. Anxious and stressed out, nervous as fuck. I found out that I had developed high blood pressure, and it was certainly directly reflected in the work of that period. Around the time of the Kenosha riot of August 2020.

I look back at different periods of this stuff now, and I think it kind of kept me together, in a way. I had to react many times, and I had to reflect. In a world coming apart at its seams, my work is where I control things and improve situations. It helped me get over myself. I used to have a friend, the late tattooist Erno, who kept a tackle box of loose jewels to play with and look at for his own enjoyment. I feel the same way about colors.

Americans are kind of known to overshare, but I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in leaving a space open for you to interpret the work any way that you like, not necessarily how I intended it. That space for open questions is here.