Curatorial Statement By James Mann, Ph.D. new
Eleventh Annual New Mexico Painters Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: Sept 15 – Oct 31, 2024
Reception: Sunday, September 15, 4-7pm
Steven Elmore - Featured Artist
James Mann - Exhibition Judge
NMHU Foundation Kennedy Gallery
905 University Ave, Las Vegas NM 87701
Additional Work Available From
Elmore Contemporary Gallery
839 Paseo De Peralta, Suite N
Santa Fe, NM 87501
See more at steveelmorestudio.com
METAPHYSICAL LANDSCAPES
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” — Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626
“There is too much conventional beauty in New Mexico art.” — Steve Elmore, 2024
This year’s specially featured artist is Santa Fe painter Steve Elmore. Artists featured in years past have included the late Jack Sinclair, Clayton Campbell, Monika Steinhoff, and last year’s Joel Greene. Steve Elmore’s paintings are the most radically original newly exhibited work that I myself have ever had the privilege to curate. One struggles in vain to identify art-historical precedents for it. It seems to come out of nowhere into the public eye, with no advance warning in the form of previous work by others. There are perhaps affinities with twentieth-century artists such as Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Wassily Kandinsky. But like the Russian Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Elmore’s work is a one-man art movement. Yet I have no idea what name to call it by that would adequately signify it, and Elmore himself offers none. Clearly it is much inspired by the New Mexico landscape, but this is transmuted into an abstracted simplicity that reduces the world of each painting to a few stark images, brought together in a unique configuration.
There are plenty of recognizable things in Elmore’s paintings, but the work is at the farthest possible objective remove from accurate representation. Elmore himself has said that originally the greatest artistic influence on his work was the hard-edged geometrical forms in the pottery of the great Hopi artist Nampeyo (1859-1942), about whom he has written an award-winning book. But there is nothing hard-edged about his compositions. “Nampeyo’s work convinced me there was an abstract spirituality, expressed in art beyond reason, that was worth pursuing,” he says today. Other influences he acknowledges are the Modernist American artists Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as the improvised, intuitive procedures of Surrealism.
Elmore is a native of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and for twenty years he worked as a commercial photographer in New York City, with his work appearing in hundreds of publications. Wanting to get beyond the surface appearance of the world, he left New York to return to his home state in 1999, explaining, “I felt disconnected from nature, the source of all creativity, and the City was too far away from Hopi Pueblos, another source of inspiration. . . . Now back in New Mexico, I felt plugged in to nature; I wanted it to speak directly through me. . . . This eternal conflict between nature and man is the source of much of the tension in my paintings.”
Over the years, he has explained his art often in interviews and in print, and it is fitting here to let him speak further for himself: “My work is a fusion of Native American art and prehistoric art with Modernism. . . . I’m mixing abstract with figuration to get to a different place that hopefully suggests there is more to life than the ordered reason we are taught. Life isn’t as nailed down as realism would have us believe.” Elsewhere he calls his work “metaphysical landscapes that express my personal biography. . . . ” In summation he says grandly, “The paintings are meant to be portals to another world, or at least suggestions that there is another world, and that the imagination is the facility to enter it.”
The American poet James Dickey has written, “We never can really tell / Whether nature condemns us or loves us.” The nature in Steve Elmore’s paintings ranges from approachable to terrifying, and it is always an earthly existence subject to a cosmic dynamism that dominates man and within which he must survive. Elmore’s depiction of this complex world and our place in it constitutes an innovative artistic frontier which is dismaying to behold, thrilling to enjoy, and inspiring and uplifting to the human mind and spirit. It is an understatement to assert that his work opens a new chapter in the art history of New Mexico, and of the United States.
—James Mann, Ph.D. (Poet, Art Theorist, Curator)
Exhibition Dates: Sept 15 – Oct 31, 2024
Reception: Sunday, September 15, 4-7pm
Steven Elmore - Featured Artist
James Mann - Exhibition Judge
NMHU Foundation Kennedy Gallery
905 University Ave, Las Vegas NM 87701
Additional Work Available From
Elmore Contemporary Gallery
839 Paseo De Peralta, Suite N
Santa Fe, NM 87501
See more at steveelmorestudio.com
METAPHYSICAL LANDSCAPES
“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” — Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626
“There is too much conventional beauty in New Mexico art.” — Steve Elmore, 2024
This year’s specially featured artist is Santa Fe painter Steve Elmore. Artists featured in years past have included the late Jack Sinclair, Clayton Campbell, Monika Steinhoff, and last year’s Joel Greene. Steve Elmore’s paintings are the most radically original newly exhibited work that I myself have ever had the privilege to curate. One struggles in vain to identify art-historical precedents for it. It seems to come out of nowhere into the public eye, with no advance warning in the form of previous work by others. There are perhaps affinities with twentieth-century artists such as Joan Miró, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Wassily Kandinsky. But like the Russian Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Elmore’s work is a one-man art movement. Yet I have no idea what name to call it by that would adequately signify it, and Elmore himself offers none. Clearly it is much inspired by the New Mexico landscape, but this is transmuted into an abstracted simplicity that reduces the world of each painting to a few stark images, brought together in a unique configuration.
There are plenty of recognizable things in Elmore’s paintings, but the work is at the farthest possible objective remove from accurate representation. Elmore himself has said that originally the greatest artistic influence on his work was the hard-edged geometrical forms in the pottery of the great Hopi artist Nampeyo (1859-1942), about whom he has written an award-winning book. But there is nothing hard-edged about his compositions. “Nampeyo’s work convinced me there was an abstract spirituality, expressed in art beyond reason, that was worth pursuing,” he says today. Other influences he acknowledges are the Modernist American artists Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as the improvised, intuitive procedures of Surrealism.
Elmore is a native of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and for twenty years he worked as a commercial photographer in New York City, with his work appearing in hundreds of publications. Wanting to get beyond the surface appearance of the world, he left New York to return to his home state in 1999, explaining, “I felt disconnected from nature, the source of all creativity, and the City was too far away from Hopi Pueblos, another source of inspiration. . . . Now back in New Mexico, I felt plugged in to nature; I wanted it to speak directly through me. . . . This eternal conflict between nature and man is the source of much of the tension in my paintings.”
Over the years, he has explained his art often in interviews and in print, and it is fitting here to let him speak further for himself: “My work is a fusion of Native American art and prehistoric art with Modernism. . . . I’m mixing abstract with figuration to get to a different place that hopefully suggests there is more to life than the ordered reason we are taught. Life isn’t as nailed down as realism would have us believe.” Elsewhere he calls his work “metaphysical landscapes that express my personal biography. . . . ” In summation he says grandly, “The paintings are meant to be portals to another world, or at least suggestions that there is another world, and that the imagination is the facility to enter it.”
The American poet James Dickey has written, “We never can really tell / Whether nature condemns us or loves us.” The nature in Steve Elmore’s paintings ranges from approachable to terrifying, and it is always an earthly existence subject to a cosmic dynamism that dominates man and within which he must survive. Elmore’s depiction of this complex world and our place in it constitutes an innovative artistic frontier which is dismaying to behold, thrilling to enjoy, and inspiring and uplifting to the human mind and spirit. It is an understatement to assert that his work opens a new chapter in the art history of New Mexico, and of the United States.
—James Mann, Ph.D. (Poet, Art Theorist, Curator)
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