Eric Aho at Burlington City Arts

Writing for Artforum in 2014, critic Donald Kuspit posited that Eric Aho’s decades-long engagement with panorama portray had much less to do with the style than with the medium itself. “He chooses to color landscapes as a result of they’re the best embodiment of the spirit of portray,” Kuspit wrote. On this exhibition, that includes sixteen latest works, Aho pushes his dialectical engagement together with his material and the technique of depicting it in thrilling, difficult new instructions.

Aho’s artwork isn’t mentioned with out point out of the truth that he paints close to the woods in a small city in Vermont. Certainly, the canvases on this exhibition—which vary in measurement from roughly six toes sq. to lower than two toes sq.—conjure a sense of sensory and non secular immersion in a romanticized concept of the New England wilderness. Some works veer nearly fully into abstraction, such because the delightfully unusual Spirit Stand and Echo Pond Edge, Wild Spring (all works cited, 2021), whose tumbling mirrored varieties and built-up scraped-away surfaces make us really feel as if we’re observing secluded waters surrounded by bushes. The wild impressionism of Orion, Mists, and Fireflies (no. 2) resolves right into a vigorous, if considerably alien, depiction of the titular bugs on a darkish and humid summer season evening. Open Pond within the Forest and Americana, nevertheless, are rendered with rather more precision and element, but the swimming pools and waterfalls they depict are nearly too picturesque to be plausible.

Though many issues could possibly be mentioned concerning the political relevance of portraying the panorama at a time of ecological upheaval, Aho’s work is, greater than something, an earnest ode to the significance of communing with nature and to the privileged capability of portray to seize the ineffable magic of this interplay.

— Jared Quinton