Untitled (Autumn Buffalo)

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Daniel Hesidence (b. 1975, American) approaches his practice as a philosophical-poetical totality. His works evince a means of sub-language communication, a primal and emotive symbolic order that both precedes and exceeds linguistic structure. Though conceived in symphonic suites, each painting dilates back and forth between dynamic eruption and smoldering aftermath, between the dispersion of cataclysmic debris and the intelligent pattern recognition required to make sense of the wreckage. Never in thrall to the easy virtues of the managerial sublime, a single Hesidence painting — at its molten core — stages the anticipatory drama of a threshold event, but without the tidy coercive atmospherics that attend such events. Consummation, if it comes at all, is nearly always provisional; and though elusive, its satisfactions can be located in Hesidence’s deep compressions of various antithetical frequencies: attraction and repulsion, sensual and cerebral, the penetratingly intimate and the frustratingly distant. Not simply the valorization of the poet’s deep subjective interiority (and its resulting narcissistic cul de sacs), Daniel Hesidence’s work bears witness to the mechanics of incremental distillation over an extended period of time. By pulling back our persistent veil of ingratiating civility, he reveals the hive mind’s reluctance to confront the unruly seepage that can never be neutralized by efficiency protocols, nor compartmentalized by existing strategies of rhetorical persuasion. At heart, then, they are bruised valentines for a bruised collective psyche which has willingly — though unknowingly — lost the crypto-mystic thread. (source: artist’s website) “A painting downloads something into you as a human. The environment, the maker’s response to it, is all there. It’s a network of information—if we as a species tap in, there is potential for real progress. Painting can be a beacon. Though archaic, what other medium or object functions as a direct record of thought that emits a signal to future generations?” Daniel Hesidence, from Dan Nadel’s article A Vulnerable Place from which to Paint, Artforum, March 2022