Running Hard

Eve Leibe Gallery is pleased to present "Running Hard" featuring paintings by Carlson Hatton. Hatton's work is neither abstract nor figurative, in his paintings reality and fiction intermingle creating a new language of stencil-type imaginary. A codifiable narrative appears between colourful brushstrokes, voids and popular characters reveal themselves to the viewers.

Carlson Hatton employs bright colors, dense patterning, and a collage-like approach to painting. His work features bright sections of gradient color and a quixotic assortment of hard edges and soft, sprayed marks. The pictures are reminiscent of early computer drawing programs and include subtle, but often highly altered representational imagery. Hatton’s 2014 painting Markers in Time shows the accumulation of color, redactions, marks, and ideas as the painting develops, becoming a testament to the artist’s process. “I'm fascinated in our shared visual lexicon and its state of continuous construction that becomes denser and more impenetrable through constant development, re-visitation, and re-appropriation,” writes Hatton. He continues, “I see excitement in such traces because they simultaneously offer universality, superficiality, and an underlying sense of truth.”