“Fresh Paint,” the series of collaborative single-artwork exhibitions presented by the Parrish Art Museum and the FLAG Art Foundation, returns to the museum Thursday with a new painting by Chase Hall created especially for this show. It will remain on view through Jan. 25.
For over 10 years, Hall, who divides his time between New York City and the Hudson Valley, has been creating figurative paintings that depict Black life, culture, and history. While the characters in his paintings are fictional, they have roots in his own experience.
“A lot of these start with archetypal representations of a self seen through different narratives, landscapes, and types of people,” Hall has said. “Oftentimes, I’m thinking of family members or friends, brotherhood, and this idea of being and becoming.” The portraits range from traditional poses to scenes of athleticism, physical labor, community gathering, and myth and fantasy. His figures are rendered at or close to life scale.
Born to a Black father and a white mother, Hall reflects on his own biracial identity in his work, exploring the conditions of constantly navigating a duality. “I’m interested in how I can speak to hybridity and mixedness and clashing and genetic humility and not feeling like enough,” he told Samuel Hine during an interview for GQ magazine.
Hall’s medium is freshly brewed coffee, as well as acrylic, on raw cotton canvas, a combination that is inherently unpredictable because, as he has said, “Working with a beverage that’s boiling, it wants to run off the painting immediately.” Thus, rapid decision-making is a must, resulting in stained fields of amber and burnt umber and linear brushstrokes.
The artist has said he can pull up to a hundred espresso shots for one painting, brewing different tones based on the type of bean and ratio of grind to water.
He is also drawn to coffee because of its political associations. The coffee seed, brought to the Americas from Africa in the 18th century, “parallels the histories of Hall’s own ancestors, and painting with the beverage allows him to engage with its ties to colonialism, extraction, and wealth production,” according to the museum. At the same time, using it as a medium adds new layers to its history.
“Fresh Paint: Chase Hall” has been organized by Scout Hutchinson, the FLAG Art Foundation associate curator of contemporary art at the Parrish, in collaboration with Jon Rider, director; Caroline Cassidy, deputy director, and Madeline DeFilippis, exhibitions and programs manager, at FLAG.
