After-Life At Seen Gallery
Sunflowers in the drawings of Tyler Vouros are really portraits of flora mort super-sized and emerging from the depths of their velvety black backgrounds. Through May 24, SEEN Gallery in Pawtucket presents a selection of Vouros’ works that emote expressive hyperrealism, featuring gigantic owls drawn by the artist.
Titled “AFTER-LIFE,” his solo exhibition puns upon the notion of things organically dead while aiming for a style of aesthetic freshness. Vouros’ works also can be interpreted as still lifes, and as such have a directed cascade of light that informs them internally. They are built-up using techniques that maximize variations in mark-making.
Vouros has created tonally complex and visually engaging surfaces. He uses a water bath to bond his finished drawings to canvases that are then stretched onto wooden supports. It is an incongruous method for the charcoal medium. and Vouros frankly describes the technique as introducing “tentative risk.” The tricky process is managed by the artist’s skill to nuance the subtlety of his pictorial surfaces, smoothing paper and blurring visual information in interesting ways.
Process is integral to his sensibility. Compositionally, he is interested in details found in twisted husks of sunflowers, or despite the stillness of the taxidermy, the countenance of the owls’ plushy plumage.
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