JULIAN HOEBER on TED GAHL

Ted Gahl
Passenger (Colebrook), 2020
Acrylic, colored pencil and graphite on canvas in artist’s frame
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
TG300
$4,000
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Detail image: Passenger (Colebrook), 2020

Alternate view: Passenger (Colebrook), 2020

Installation view: Passenger (Colebrook), 2020

I mention this because Ted Gahl’s train station paintings, though scarcely narrative, manage to take up an awful lot of time. They turn the clock backwards: the paintings look like the end of the 19th Century. They have a softness of form while still being representational that gives off a whiff of Post-Impressionism, and they’re pictures of trains, the quintessential technology of that period, when human desire and thought were compared to the locomotive as they are now to the computer. The paintings look like Munch’s The Scream with the single figure in mid-foreground suspended in deep single point perspective, and they resonate with the Northern Romantic tradition that links Munch to Caspar David Friederich and the struggle of a lone person confronted by the vastness of the world.

Ted Gahl
Passenger, 2020
Acrylic, colored pencil and graphite on canvas in artist’s frame
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
TG298
$4,000
   INQUIRE   

Detail image: Passenger, 2020

Alternate view: Passenger, 2020

Installation view: Passenger, 2020

That train and that deep perspective also point to the moment at the beginning of the 19th C. when narrative painting seemed to crumble. Three years after Munch painted The Scream, the Lumière Brothers screened their film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, showing a single-point perspective view of a train entering a station. One of the earliest motion pictures, the legend of this film is that audiences fled from the screen thinking it was a real train. Gahl’s painting then depicts this moment: painting reaching ambitiously for emotional power through the isolated figure and expressive color, and also finding the end of a certain kind of usefulness for itself. We see the figure waiting for the train that’s just a speck of light at the horizon. If the Lumières’ train ever gets into the station, it’ll be the beginning of the end for narrative painting.

Ted Gahl
Passenger (Java), 2020
Acrylic, colored pencil and graphite on canvas in artist’s frame
20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
TG301
$4,000
   INQUIRE   

Detail image: Passenger (Java), 2020

Alternate view: Passenger (Java), 2020

Installation view: Passenger (Java), 2020

The time in Gahl’s paintings depends on the key moment never arriving. The train never gets there. Instead, the event is replaced with seriality. The painting is made over and over. Different colors and marks and surfaces shift the emotional tenor, each time a reconsideration of the affect of the experience in the station. Looking at the group of them is like wondering what it will feel like when the train finally arrives, and trying to recognize one’s feelings in that moment just before possibility is exhausted.

—Julian Hoeber, Los Angeles. August, 2020.