Eva Presenhuber is delighted to announce a special summer project of paintings by the American artist John Dilg.

John Dilg’s paintings feel like landscapes rather than being such.

Dilg paints metaphors and abstractions using what he calls a mental archive of essential visual forms, drawing on memory and tonalities of color and the sensations they can convey to create an enthralling, symphonic whole that emphasizes stillness and the continuum of time.

The subjects of these works are not the objects that occupy the paintings but the representation of a moment in time in itself.

Used as visual analogs, the shapes and hues in the paintings become the framework to depict the world at large and create the narratives inside the paintings.

Paint is used for the conceptualization of ideas encompassing both the empirical properties of nature and its spiritual transcendence: The restorative possibilities of beauty found in a landscape idealized and therefore transformed.

Eneas Capalbo

My paintings are part of an ongoing meditation on my relationship to the land and its ability to conjure vivid, visual memories. They are codified summaries of locality and place born from these memories. The newly reawakened concern for our fragile environment fosters the views of regret and the sense of latent danger that often occur in my paintings.

John Dilg

John Dilg was born in 1945 in Evanston, IL, US, and received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, US. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant to India, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and three residencies at the YADDO Foundation, Saratoga Springs, NY, US. Dilg’s work is represented in the public collections of institutions including the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR, US; the Figge Museum of Art, Davenport, IA, US; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, US; and Museu d'Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Villafamés, ES.