Cheyney Thompson

Cheyney Thompson’s art touches on such wide-ranging subjects as the art market, temporality, and the French archetypal villain Robert Macaire—sometimes within the space of a single work. For his first US museum survey, the artist’s rhizomatic research is highlighted through paintings made in the past six years. The thirteen canvases from his glistening, jubilant “Chronochromes” series, 2009–11, are unified along a color spectrum that documents its own creation: With every hour of production, contrasting color pairs were shifted in hue, and brushstrokes’ saturation levels changed with each passing month. Time is reflected in the ebb and flow of vaguely arabesque color patches that seem painted more through a precise mechanical apparatus than by the artist’s hand.

The serial works “4 Colors Subtracting Light from the Room in 6 Degrees of Intensity Repeated 4 Times,” 2006, consist of eight portraits of Thompson’s studio’s landlords. The grouping was produced according to the four-color CMYK process used in commercial printing, and this restrictive scheme gives the figures a ghostly, degraded presence. With the seriality of a Warhol portrait and the faded pastels of a Kinkade landscape, the series effectively represents two individuals while voiding any aura of individuality.

There is an impenetrability to Thompson’s art, which is unexpected given that his references and methods are so extensive and clearly elucidated. Alongside the paintings and sculptures are bound copies of the artist’s research journals, documenting topics such as the Munsell color system, James Rousseau’s 1842 novel on Robert Macaire, and graphic male initiation rites. Inadvertently or not, this dispersal of references both informs and veils the ideas underpinning Thompson’s art. Ultimately, however, the nearly three-inch-thick tomes avoid digression and apply an additional medium to Thompson’s expanding practice.