JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Nature Remains, a solo exhibition of work by Vermont-based artist Eric Aho, on view June 9th, 2023 through July 30th, 2023. A printed catalogue will accompany this exhibition with an essay by Christopher Volpe. An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 9th, from 5 - 7 pm. All are welcome to attend.
Nature Remains presents a selection of oil paintings ranging in scale from very small to monumental. The exhibition title refers to a timeless speculation made by Walt Whitman in Specimen Days: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Eric Aho has rightly been called an abstract artist who paints landscapes. Yet, there is a reason for Aho’s motionless lakes and forested clearings, his surging headwaters, lakes, waterfalls and rivers of pine-drowning runoff or stone-crushing ice.
Aho’s work traces a three-way conversation between the qualities of painting (principally color, texture, and geometry), our connection to the earth, and the loss of that connection. For Aho, who works from a hybrid of observation and memory, landscape painting is a way of possessing something we cannot possess, hovering between perception and what’s considered “real,” something there and not there, eluding our grasp. Painting is also a way of situating intimacy within the physical immensity of the ever-changing natural world.
Half-submerged tree limbs jut like runic lettering scrawled across the foregrounds of works like Trillium and Mists, Vernal Pool and Pond Edge, taunting, cryptic, and ultimately undecipherable. Elsewhere, depth opens only to be negated by surface. (There is one other species of painting that both offers depth and negates it, the variety that used to be called “religious.”) An almost mystical element resonates in works like Mirrored Lake in a Violet-Dark Forest (48 x 52 inches), where rocks and shoreline scrub don phosphorescent haloes; enigmatic colors and shapes emerge from mirror-still waters, the landscape wavers and jags in and out of focus and definition, then vanishes like smoke toward nebulous mountains under a restless sky.
We possess life and then we don’t; it is not perhaps entirely overreaching to posit a corresponding metaphysics of desire and loss inherent in this work. But for Aho, nature is above all generative, a fertile field for the creative imagination, and landscape is the theater in which the human drama plays out.
Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, Eric Aho studied at the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London, England and then received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. Aho has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions were held at New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, and the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, among others.
