Ian Myers: The cut worm forgives the plow

“Build up, tear down, compress, compact, weed-through, dig up again, repeat — wait for something to happen. A stray mark given form, given place, set adrift. Painting is a kind of devotional act, so is looking, or looking closely— searching, really, but a goalless search, bracketed by impulse on one end and revelation, though more often failure, on the other. The material conventions of early Christian iconography— egg tempera, rabbit-skin gesso— add loft to this search and beg that perhaps that material opulence was really just compensating for something; gold-plated doubt; lapis-shrouded hole. Cut it down and it still grows.”

–Ian Myers

CHART is delighted to present Ian Myers: The cut worm forgives the plow, a solo exhibition of ten 10×8-inch panels in egg tempera on marble dust ground, on view in the gallery’s lower-level PROJECTION space.

The exhibition title is drawn from a line in William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (1790–1793), part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Often described as a mystic, Blake wrote in a voice that moves between devotion and doubt, conviction and contradiction. For Myers, this ambiguity closely parallels the act of painting and centers a recurring question in his practice: what does a painting do, and how does it operate? Working in egg tempera, a medium associated with early religious icon painting and taken up by only a handful of artists as a primary method since, allows Myers to situate this question within a narrow historical lineage defined by a devotion to material, its inherent limitations, and close looking.

Scale and intimacy are paramount to this body of work. The shift from 12×9-inch panels in Myers’s previous exhibition to a more tightly constrained format increases both the density of material within the paintings and the time required for them to come into focus. The compressed scale heightens the relationship between mark and surface, allowing layers of paint to accumulate over extended periods and giving each panel a sense of its own history—of having come into being gradually, almost on its own. A monochrome green painting titled field underscores this focus, drawing attention to surface, material, and the tension between illusion and the physical reality of a repeatedly worked ground.

Ian Myers: The cut worm forgives the plow continues CHART’s PROJECTION series in the lower-level space, which highlights and supports emerging or underrecognized artists.