PROJECTION 012: IAN MYERS

The exhibition title is drawn from a line in William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell (1790–1793), part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Often described as a mystic, Blake wrote in a voice that moves between devotion and doubt, conviction and contradiction. For Myers, this ambiguity closely parallels the act of painting and centers a recurring question in his practice: what does a painting do, and how does it operate? Working in egg tempera, a medium associated with early religious icon painting and taken up by only a handful of artists as a primary method since, allows Myers to situate this question within a narrow historical lineage defined by a devotion to material, its inherent limitations, and close looking.

Scale and intimacy are paramount to this body of work. The shift from 12×9-inch panels in Myers’s previous exhibition to a more tightly constrained format increases both the density of material within the paintings and the time required for them to come into focus. The compressed scale heightens the relationship between mark and surface, allowing layers of paint to accumulate over extended periods and giving each panel a sense of its own history—of having come into being gradually, almost on its own. A monochrome green painting titled field underscores this focus, drawing attention to surface, material, and the tension between illusion and the physical reality of a repeatedly worked ground.

What three words feel most accurate to your practice right now? And why?

I’m not sure about three words, but one I feel compelled to reject is surrealist. It’s a reductive label that’s been used so broadly it now means very little. Bosch isn’t a surrealist, even if the creatures in his hell resemble nightmares. Freud is a whiner. If there is a subconscious at work, it isn’t operating here.

What interests me is the relationship between material happenstance, articulated gesture, and historical precedent in painting. Painting—and art more broadly—is thinking made material. Whether in the divinity of early icons or the pseudo-psychological claims of Abstract Expressionism, a mind is always at work. (This answer came to me in a dream.)

Searching and scrutiny—that’s at least two words.

Working in egg tempera places you within a very specific historical lineage tied to early Christianiconography. What draws you to that material constraint today, and how does its slowness or resistance shape the way meaning emerges in your paintings?

I think painting is at a weird spot. Beyond a material interest, I’m drawn to early Christian icons because they are paintings with a literal function: sites for contemplation, or even, for some viewers, objects of miraculous potential. That position feels very different from much contemporary painting, which often seems uncertain of its role in a world saturated with images.

Thinking of painting as a kind of devotional might sound lofty, even absurd, but this way of looking is essential. It asks the viewer to approach a painting openly—ready to discover something or pursue a question. I want my paintings to place the viewer in a position similar to my own while making them: searching without knowing what might appear, but compelled to keep looking.

Egg tempera’s relationship to the icon contextualizes this search and gives me space to explore form from one painting to the next. Meaning emerges slowly through months of building up a surface, tearing it down, and rebuilding it. When something unexpected appears, the painting begins to feel almost conversational—sometimes even revelatory. In those moments it seems to acquire a kind of agency, a function, and therefore a reason to exist. Slowness is a byproduct of this “waiting for something to happen,” of jockeying between doubt and faith in the little arena of the painting.

Do you think of this body of work as a series of self-contained objects, or as fragments of something larger—like pages, relics, or thresholds into another space?

Each painting is an individual, and in each case I am looking (or just hoping?) for something new, however slight. In each painting, I’m primarily concerned with the material dictating what happens. If that yields something that begins to imply illusory depth or a kind of portal, I’ll either embellish or squash it; cover it up or add work up another part that undercuts that effect. Pages, relics or thresholds into another space— I think all of the above and all at once! A successful painting, to me, is when it is constantly pushing and pulling— inviting a viewer deeper in, then rejecting them outright, back to the craggy, worked surface of the thing.

AsI’ve worked from one painting to the next in this group, I’ve become more and more direct in creating akind of object in space (the pear or the point). On the one hand, I’m interested in how I can make use of the typical application of egg tempera— cross-hatched forms atop a pseudo-verdaccio layer — and then let it be subsumed by the material around it, allwhile adding up to a single whole. I think this is what I’ll be working towards for a long time to come.

Outside the studio, what books, music, or movies are currently feeding your thinking?

Jon Fosse’s Septology and really everything by Olga Tokarczuk or Sebald had a huge impact on what I felt I could even attempt to address in painting: a kind of divinity in the mundane or the routine or the form itself, whether that be repetitive, unending sentences, or the interweaving of disparate narratives all while questioning the worth of the endeavor. Tokarczuk got me reading William Blake’s poetry again; equal parts fortifying and bizarre, and a kind of faith that is impossible to emulate. A few of Ottessa Moshfeigh’s books- Death in Her Hands and Lapvona — have been useful examples of how to deal with the form of the thing you’re doing while you do it— a detective story about a detective story, a fairy tale about a fairy tale— finding new ways to acknowledge that, no matter what you’re looking at, you’re also looking at your own nose