This year at The Armory Show, Charles Moffett is pleased to present new works by Canadian artist Keiran Brennan Hinton. The booth encompasses a new series of paintings that the artist created throughout the spring and summer, when he spent time in the Hudson Valley, specifically living and working in and around Innisfree Garden located in Millbrook, NY. A 185-acre landscape, which first opened to the public in May 1960, Innisfree Garden is a quintessentially American stroll garden, one that deftly uses light and nature to guide visitors through the landscape. For an artist whose practice focuses on formal painting processes, the sustained act of observation, the plein-air discipline, and painting's ability to capture the shifting sensations of light and reflection, the time spent in Innisfree Garden proved breathtakingly fruitful for Brennan Hinton's latest work.
While working within the very same environment as the leading American painters of the 19th century Hudson River School, Brennan Hinton approaches the painterly representation of landscape from a distinct perspective of his predecessors. Rather than one of allegory or explorations of the sublime, Brennan Hinton's practice is one of testifying. Nothing is uncovered that has not always been present, but the paintings are a testament to and reward for the physical sensation of the eyes' discernment of colors, light, shadows, patterns, animals in stillness and in movement. For his larger compositions, such as Viewshed, Brennan Hinton paints them over a series of days. He returned to Innisfree Garden day after day, visiting the exact same position in the landscape, and fusing the surrounding environment as it exists in a variety of weather conditions and light levels into a singular frame. The reward of the artist's paintings lies not in the detection of something hidden nor in the discovery of an imagined meaning, but in the profound experience of looking at nature as it is - the active engagement in the slow process of perception, the existence within a space from a position of curiosity and wonder rather than assumption.
Compositionally, rather than a traditional foreground, middleground, and background, Brennan Hinton often collapses or bends the perspective within his landscapes in ways that ground the viewer firmly and viscerally within the space. For instance, in the large-scale painting Innisfree Yarimizu, the artist renders the bird soaring in the distance just as crisply as the rocks at the bottom of the oxbow meadow stream - abandoning one vanishing point in favor of a convergence of perspectives that mirrors the real life experience of absorbing multiple sensory inputs at once. The artist pushes this technique even further in the monumental diptych painting Innisfree Panorama. Here he offers the viewer a panorama of the garden, rendering in stillness a view that could only be achieved through our own movement. In this way, Brennan Hinton's paintings feel embodied; indirectly suggesting our presence, our position, our progression through the landscape without ever directly representing a figure.
Uniquely though in this composition the artist does acknowledge his presence, evoked through the portrayal of his standing easel, canvas and palette - admitting his role as translator between these worlds. While acknowledged, it's a role that Brennan Hinton continually aims to minimize in the creation of his paintings, striving to paint the landscape before him in as direct and unmediated a manner as possible. Uniquely for an artist working in oils, particularly outdoors, Brennan Hinton paints wet-on-wet, rather than allowing each layer to dry, so that he can move quickly and capture the essence of the light and color as immediately as it appears to him. Maximizing the possibilities of such direct painting, he works nimbly to record the world as it moves around him. In the last year or so, the artist has pushed this even further and begun to use the light and shadows that fall naturally onto the canvas itself to guide his brushstrokes, rendering highlights and shadows in paint where they appear in life. This technique particularly shines in the painting Pine Island, which vividly captures Innisfree Garden's grove of backlit pine trees, the red hue that emanates from the needle-strewn ground, the light that pierces through their tall, narrow trunks.
Brennan Hinton's paintings break through the mediations that interrupt our experiences of the world around us. Grounding us in space and slowing down our gaze, his paintings empower our senses to absorb the otherwise imperceptible and continually evolving shifts of light, shadow, temperature, air, and water that articulate our world - one that is ever-familiar and ever-present but so often overlooked.
Keiran Brennan Hinton (b. 1992, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto and Elgin, Ontario. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2014 and his MFA from Yale University in 2016. Past international solo shows of Brennan Hinton's work include exhibitions at Charles Moffett (2023 and 2021); MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Thomas Fuchs Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany (2021); Michael Gibson Gallery, London, Ontario (2020); and Francesco Pantaleone Gallery, Palermo, Italy (2019) among others. His paintings have been featured in institutional exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario; James Castle House, Boise, Idaho; and Katonah Museum of Art, Westchester, NY. He completed the Beecher Residency, Litchfield, CT in 2023.
