In his second solo exhibition at Keystone Gallery, centre-zero prophecies, Nate Zoba reintroduces heavy brush marks into his oil paintings through the chevron form. His previous body of geometric colorfield paintings of thinly applied oil paint left little evidence of the artist’s hand. In the current exhibition, Zoba references this previous body through the grounds of the new paintings, upon which the brushstrokes are painted and the artist’s hand is re-introduced. The chevron-forms, manifest in impasto palette-knife application, do not operate as pattern but instead are rhythmically replicated, inverted, and sequenced, forming closed systems that are occasionally severed. These pseudo-forms gesture toward symbol or signifier, not pattern.

In this work, Zoba’s brushstroke/knife-marks are composed around the 0,0,0 axis of Cartesian coordinates in both stable and shifting centres. The delicate washes of the grounds, which imply continuation beyond the frame, exist in dimensional tension to the dense, pure pigments of the bounded forms applied upon them. A geometrical and linear uniformity holds the two together in a kinetic space of the surface tension. The color palettes oscillate between cool and subdued in some, and bright and vigorous in others. Each piece, in continuation of Zoba’s previous body of work, implies a bilateral symmetry, but like the human body, is not truly symmetrical.

Through these juxtapositions, Zoba takes his minimal and maximal positions in painting to present these portents that interrogate, conflate, and fragment the ideas of presence and erasure, pattern and symbol, surface and ground, the centred and uncentred.

Nate Zoba is a Los Angeles-based artist. He has a BA in English from the University of Illinois and a MA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University where he received the distinguished thesis award. His work had been published in Books & Culture, Drunken Boat, MAKE Magazine, and most recently was included in MAKE X: An Anthology. His paintings have been exhibited in Chicago and Los Angeles and are in private collections throughout the country.