For over two decades, painter Gaylen Hansen has returned to a small and curious collection of images to explore the broad subjects of nature, human inquiry, and the act of art making.
Traversing this familiar landscape time and time again, Hansen’s work grows stronger and more focused with each successive exhibition; his figures become more tightly wound, his textures richer and subtler, and the energy emanating from the canvas more powerful.
Hansen’s pantheon of wild beasts suggests Native American myth and cosmology while the Kernal, his ubiquitous bearded horseman, serves as a kind of American knight-errant whose grail remains a mystery.
For Hansen, nature is dramatized through violent collisions of forms, scale, and species that often have sexual overtones — a sea of ducks crashing against a field of tulips, for example, or a huge grasshopper perched backwards atop a horse. In the presence of the Kernal, Hansen’s cartoon-like creatures and surrounding environment take on a more menacing quality. In one painting, an enormous bear looms over him as he glides by in a canoe. In another, he jousts with a giant thrashing fish on a log suspended over a rushing stream.
Sometimes the Kernal’s struggles are more sublime. In one of the more striking paintings in the show, we see him ride timidly through a field of swaying, red tulip flowers larger than his horse. Another one shows him briskly riding by the bare-breasted ruins of some colossal, misplaced Erectheon without so much as a sidelong glance.
The wandering Kernal is Hansen’s portrait of himself as an artist — oblivious one moment, fighting for his life the next, in a surreal landscape that resembles the strange rolling hills of his Palouse home.
