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Raychael Stine

Hedon Eden

Los Angeles | April 24 - May 25, 2021
Press:    Artforum     University of New Mexico





Spring sunshower with flower eaters ( 2 ecstatic jammers with Iris, black orchid and sky flower) 
2021  oil and acrylic on canvas 40 x 50”






Five Car Garage is thrilled to present HEDON EDEN, the first solo exhibition of New Mexico based painter Raychael Stine. Hedon Eden is an homage to ecstatic blooming and sensual growth. The kind of transformation that ‘Spring’ expresses so precisely herself, after she has been so tightly coiled in a bud, after a long, dark and impossible winter.

Rendered through exuberant abstractions with varied applications of paint, this new body of work comprises both of Stine’s “Vision” and “Jammer” series, which synthesize the interplay between the diffuse yet striking aural color and atmosphere of her Vision paintings, and the corporeal and immutable Jammer paintings.

In both series Stine plays and pushes against the mechanics of the painted edged  frames within her artworks. This dedication to the framing device - abstraction as representation, also appears in work of one of her favorites - Howard Hodgkin, a British painter whose is best known for his breech of the frame and distilling down the sensory and temporal into luscious and colorful abstractions.

In the ‘Jammer,’ series Stine, adopts  a similar approach to Hodgkin’s ‘frame within a frame’ construction of paintings. She embodies a shared joyful use of color and thick brushed paint,  but the similarity stops there. Stine sees her work with the frames, more as a threshold, or a portal and a succinct gateway for her audience to step through, before fully immersing themselves into her vivaciously built and painted universe.

Once inside her screen, the artist’s vocabulary is on full volume, with thick muscular paint confidently slashed across the canvas. The ecstatic colors are punctuated with spritely petals, rainbows, tromp l’oeil teardrops and ‘secret’ dogs with hidden snouts poking through. As Stine successfully brings her viewer into her land, she keeps the playful energy going, reminding her lookers of the frame and a larger awareness that they are still in the realm of being inside a picture and looking at the object itself.

The tempo is gentler in the ‘Vision’ paintings, where Stine  incorporates time, light, and space from memory and pictures. They mark a transitional space between material and picture, object/image and painting. The ‘Vision’  is a direct nod to the actual processes of vision-focus in the foreground on the subject, and diffuse light in the back. It suggests an unclear amount of depth, and it is the in-between depth that Stine is most interested in having us float about in. This transitional and transformative space is often the subject of the vision paintings.

In Hedon Edon, Stine dispenses through her paintings the sensate charges of play and desire, calling up the regenerative power of nature to capture this hedonistic expression, that primates and vegetable/flower forms have no fear or repression in displaying. Everything is in full bloom in this universe and we are invited to the dance!