Daniel Crews-Chubb: Finding Figures

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Finding Figures, an exhibition of new works on paper by Daniel Crews-Chubb, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Building on his previous exploration of the figure's formal and philosophical possibilities, Crews-Chubb’s new works take an increasingly abstract direction, aiming to uncover the timeless and universal rather than the contemporary and specific.

For nearly ten years Crews-Chubb has centered the figure in his work, using it as a flexible motif that blends ancient references to Aztec deities and Hindu gods with more recent art historical influences, including Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and the CoBrA movement. His figures, whether solitary or in groups, are intentionally devoid of defining features that might tie them to specific races, genders or cultural identities. By allowing them to be read as archetypes rather than embodiments of specific historical periods, Crews-Chubb invites viewers to consider the body in a more fundamental and primary sense—as a vessel of energy rather than a container for subjectivity.

Though Finding Figures marks the first time that Crews-Chubb will solely exhibit works on paper, he has retained the materially dense, compositionally frenetic and formally complex qualities that are typical of his works on canvas and which are due in large part to the manner in which he paints, a process he likens to sculpture. Beginning with his substrates on the floor, Crews-Chubb then covers them with a wide array of materials, including acrylics, oil pastels, charcoal, sand and inks, while seldom using brushes for the application or refinement of his compositions. Once the rough outline of a silhouette or compositional structure has emerged he moves each work onto the wall and continues to both add and remove material as he searches for the right balance of figure and ground, shape and atmosphere. Like his choice of materials, Crews-Chubb’s palettes are varied and expansive and they express his interest in pairing colors and materials evoking the organic and natural with those that seem artificial, industrial and irrefutably new.

The drive towards greater degrees of abstraction in these works is reflective of Crews-Chubb’s ongoing interest in pareidolia, the psychological and perceptual phenomenon whereby humans perceive order, patterns or structure in otherwise random and diffuse stimuli, as when a face or object is seen amidst fleeting cloud formations. This deeply human and universal drive to convert the abstract into the concrete takes on a formal dimension in Crews-Chubb’s works, in which figures are somewhat discernible and seemingly on the cusp of dissolving into the larger world of their compositions. The internal split between order and its absence is never resolved in these works. Instead, both possibilities exist simultaneously and in productive tension with one another.