Kevin Specht

Kevin Specht likes contrast. Colossal buildings towering over miniature people. Snowensconced mountains packed with skiers. Lush, blossoming hillsides abandoned by visitors. Bathing suits in blizzards. Teeming crowds of faceless people. Midnight blue shot through with florescent red. An affinity that might extend beyond his subject matter to Specht himself, a kitchen appliance salesman and a painter. The fifteen works in Afterglow utilize color, scale, and perspective to illuminate the multitude of surprising juxtapositions that surround us all the time, throwing the subjectivity of perspective into stark relief.

Specht, who started painting after he was gifted a set of acrylics for a birthday ten years before, begins each piece by collaging elements from his extensive collection of photos, archival materials, film stills, and stock imagery. After assembling his cinematic composition on the screen, he turns to the canvas, where he attempts to remove himself as much as possible from the experience of painting, ceding the seat of action to the unconscious. “I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, anything to keep me from overthinking what I’m doing with my hands,” explains Specht. “I want the work to emerge on its own.” The result? Familiar scenes rendered surreal and ethereal where skylines, mountain ranges, and hurried commuters emerge as if from deep within dreams shrouded in enigma and alchemy. Luminous, often monochromatic color washes, striking silhouettes, and uneven, dapple lighting lend the paintings their otherworldly quality. Rather than venturing to recreate an exact moment or an exact place, Specht allows his memories, emotions, and present experiences to contort and color over the images casting them in entirely unexpected lights. In Summer Chairlift, a flourishing, flower-covered mountainside is tinged in deep, melancholic cobalt, and in Walking Home, a city street at dusk glows in a rich, antagonistic crimson. While the various blues in Winter Chairlift conjure a sense of tranquility and reverence, the blue of Commuters 2 feels distinctly eerie and unsettling. To view the paintings in Afterglow is to experience them as if from within. While Specht declinesto expound upon the specific narratives depicted, preferring that viewers assign their own stories, he points toward his vested interest in time as a recurring thematic element in his work. That the human experience of time is cyclical is evidenced by his attention to changing seasons, transitions between day and night, and even by his use of a chairlift motif, an apparatus that runsin a perpetual loop up and down a mountain. The juxtaposition between the magnificent, primarily unaffected mountains and the towering skyscrapers reminds the viewer of time’s unstoppable force and the undaunting pursuit of progress that follows. Progress urged onward by the hurried commuters rushing to their offices and then, in contrast, enjoyed by the skiers and bathersluxuriating on holiday. In this way, the past and presentseem to coalesce, similarly to an afterglow, wherein the light from yesterday’s sun still illuminates today’s sky.