A Lover's Discourse: Chase Hall

12 oz. army cotton duck canvas signals white- ness’s shifty guises. By weaponizing coffee and cotton, he interrogates those associations. Field Painting ’s vibrant greens in juicy acrylic impasto convey an almost Joan Mitchell-like joy in nature. By contrast, notice how the coffee’s thinness embeds itself into the weave as shadowy stains. 16 The gamut of touches looks tantamount to camouflage. 17 A forested game of hide-and-seek surrounding a full-on gaze that might bespeak a prisoner, a nature boy or Everyman. White underneath haunts mocha above, emphasizing in-betweenness. Neither quite wins. A quick fact completes this artful intrigue. Hall has a blond white mother and a Black father. And I, for one, think he is right to champion “mixedness” 18 : “I didn’t want my work to just be about Blackness. I wanted to bring all of me into the picture.” As in nature, so in culture and vice- versa (Barthes said we tend to confuse them 19 ). Both domains offer myriad examples of how a rich mix often yields strength, diversity and newness. Remember Charles Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” the statement with which he closed an epic celebra- tion of life on earth, Origin of Species (1859)? By comparison, the dark twentieth century proved far too many times that “purity”—though such an absolute might be fine for vodka, diamonds, horses and Clement Greenberg’s modernist flat color fields—can lead to disastrous human ends. 20 Instead, hooray for hybrids!

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