André Hemer’s paintings contain gobs and streaks of viscid acrylic and pigment—crimsons, golds, purples. Their surfaces are adorned with floral elements that encircle blue skies and peachy sunsets. Think the Rococo magnificence of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Chariot of Aurora, ca. 1760s, or François Lemoyne’s Apotheosis of Hercules, 1733–36, which sits in the Palace of Versailles. But Hemer soups up that movement’s genteel pastels with vivid saturation, depopulates its mythic scenarios, and melts the remaining abstract components into gooey, lava lamp–like wreaths. The results of these processes were realized in “Troposphere,” the artist’s compelling solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart gallery, comprising ten paintings and a video, all from 2023. While the canvases were of various shapes and scales, a selection of oval pieces reached a high point of aesthetic fineness and felt most in sync with canonical references—the ovate structures even allude to rebirth, the literal meaning of renaissance.
To make his works, Hemer captures the sky with a flatbed scanner (lending the plein air approach a digital twist) while arranging sculptured portions of dried paint and botanic fragments on the device’s glass. He then prints the visuals onto canvas, adding both wet paint and pigments made from desiccated flora to form thick volcanic surfaces that trap light and accentuate tone. The compositions are based on di sotto in sù, a technique used in Italian Renaissance ceiling frescoes to create the illusion of space and distance. From our point of view, Hemer’s imagery makes it seem as though we’re hunkered down in the nest of a bird or animal of prey, gazing out into the vastness of the heavens. It puts things in perspective, reminding us of our insignificance relative to the universe, as was evident in Troposphere #9, whose palette of dramatic pinks and reds were skillfully used to produce a vertiginous contrast between foreground and background.
The troposphere is the lowest level of Earth’s atmosphere, extending approximately six miles above the planet’s surface. If Hemer’s art occupies a metaphorical region, it is there, where terrestrial reality meets celestial aspiration. Many of the works featured a tantalizing array of coppers and silvers, which evoke the metallic fabrics of satellite sails and spacecraft—the instruments that enable our ceaseless quest for knowledge. It was apparent in Troposphere #3, which looks like an orbiting field of cosmic debris from the film Gravity (2013). In Troposphere #7, a section of digital imagery in the pinkish, Martian-like sky was smeared into a warped sci-fi blur that collides with the surrounding blooms. Hemer’s palette is also redolent of opulent aristocratic costumes and garish papal regalia, with all their attendant dogmatic rituals. For instance, the bloodred smudges at the lower-left segment of Troposphere #2 called to mind a priestly silhouette, ostentatiously hooded and robed. His right arm appears to be raised in what could be a protective stance, or one of pompous acrimonious judgment.
While Hemer’s works are evocative of history painting in their import and ambition, this does not impede their conceptual ingenuity and inventive transporting formalism. Because the artist’s compositions are often telescopic, Hemer encourages us to look beyond the confines of the frame—out onto the world, into the stratosphere, and back at ourselves. The beauty of his art is a testament to both our most humbling moments and our greatest achievements.
