Philadelphia Introductions: Tyler Kline

Tyler Kline, Queen Bee, 2003, carbon print and oil on wood, 8" x 25"

Philadelphia Introductions:
Tyler Kline

by
Andrea Kirsh

August 20, 2006

Tyler Kline was a skateboarder and for a number of years he recycled his old boards as painting supports, much as he recycled imagery from newspapers, magazine covers, other painters, and favorite films. He transferred the found images with Xeroxes which yield their ink when pressed against the painting’s surface; these function partially as under-drawings but parts remain visible in the finished works. These paintings were composed of layered images, sometimes overlaid with delicate texts; palimpsests that betray the violence and anxiety that run through his work but that never resolve into simple messages. The skateboards make surprisingly elegant paintings, cropped into lozenge forms, or pieced into cruciform shapes that curl gently towards the wall at their oval edges. Art connoisseurs are unlikely to recognize the seven-part laminate that signals to skateboarders the source of the panels. And this viewer didn’t recognize the hip-hop luminary Little Kim as the subject in Queen Bee, (2003). It doesn’t matter; the paintings read clearly as compressed records of youthful, urban pain, with images scavenged from popular media and wide-ranging, sometimes esoteric reading.

Kline likes skulls. He paints them and he sculpts them out of every possible material from wax to crumpled aluminum foil. He knows his skulls, having studied physical anthropology, and for him the varied proportions of temple to mandible tell the story of evolution. He identifies each one as we pass them. He occasionally invents one, such as the small skull with a single, central eye socket; but then, his work began with a significant debt to the subject matter and imagery of science fiction.

Above all Tyler Kline loves paint. Oil paint. He loves its possibilities for delicate glazes, scumbles, varied impasto. He loves its slowness. And he knows his paints. Kline worked for Gamblin, one of the great American paint manufacturers, and he used Prussian Blue as the subject of one of his paintings. Kline likes the color and its history: not only is it the first of the modern synthetic pigments, but it resulted by accident when a chemist was trying to synthesize a red. And this abiding interest in oil paint distinguishes him from many of his American contemporaries who listen to the same music, read the same books and magazines, are similarly oppressed by the current political climate and trying to make sense of a visual world already over-saturated with pre-packaged images. All the painters he spoke of are European: Neo Rauch, Peter Doig, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud.

In 2003 he produced a particularly mature painting, LIN, made of three rows of three abutting panels, 9"x11" each. The title comes from Werner Herzog’s 1992 apocalyptic Lessons in Darkness; the imagery is based on Polaroid photos after the film which was shot in Kuwait City after the first Gulf War. Kline has framed each image; it might be a storyboard. At upper left are tools of torture, laid out on a white cloth. A black figure pelted by a water spray, with fire in the background. Heavy equipment against the same fiery landscape. A headlight. We recognize a firefighter at middle right, but other than the head scarf that indicates a Muslim woman, the bottom row refuses a clear reading. Over the nine panels are lines painted in another register: thin, yellow connectors that cut across the scenes and dots that imply significant nodes. The lines also anchor the nine scenes to the background.

This double register of painting persists in most of Kline’s recent work, usually in a dichotomy of rough, gestural paintwork or puddles of thinned color (sometimes applied to a horizontal canvas) worked against fine connecting lines or elegant, loopy, almost calligraphic flourishes. U-boat (2006) depicts an aircraft carrier within a frankly romantic landscape, taken from an actual view of Philadelphia harbor. Its oil paint is handled with light washes that suggest watercolor. A small black plane is about to land and extravagant white plumes surrounding the boat suggest rockets or explosions.

Did I mention that Kline moved to Philadelphia from Oregon three years ago, as did I (he from Portland, I from Eugene; this was a total coincidence)? Kline showed me a group of small drawings which he will include in an installation in September at Zeitgeist Gallery in Portland. They betray a tone of anguish and imagery of dismemberment that runs through his work. But the recent work also includes pictures of his wife Anna, pregnant, and their infant son, Max. Kline is already struggling with how they will raise the child in a world that fills his art with so many images of darkness.

See more of Tyler Kline's work at his InLiquid artist page

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