The Undertow

David Aipperspach

October 19 - November 23, 2024

Opening Saturday Reception: October 19 | 4-7pm

Second Thursday Reception: Thursday, November 14 | 6-9 pm

Open Saturdays from 12-5pm or by appointment

Peep Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist David Aipperspach. Aipperspach will debut several new paintings alongside a printed exhibition catalog, which will be available at the gallery.

The Generative Resistance and Negative Storytelling of The Undertow

Alyssa Songsiridej

Looking is an act, an action, a process that, to do properly, involves the body in space and time. A fact I often take for granted, especially—it’s a cliché!—with my phone, which I use all day to stare at images that fail to register in my body. The technology is too frictionless, much too slippery. Recently, I even failed the embarrassing New York Times “focus challenge”, specifically the September 19th edition featuring Catherine Murphy’s Canopy (a painting David Aipperspach admires, by the way). To rectify my atomized attention, the New York Times instructs me, the reader, to stay with a digitized Canopy for at least ten minutes. I’m free to use my fingers to pinch and move the lavish imagery, zooming in and out of the water buckets. I didn’t make it more than three and a half minutes, and confession, I reached even that number by cheating, taking some time to stare at the ceiling.

Aipperspach’s paintings act as an antidote, or maybe more accurately, a challenge to the way we now conduct the act of looking. Each piece is densely layered in time, both in the process of making the work and also in the visual history signaled by the slyly disparate elements. The content is not inherently disturbing—marshes, shadows, sundials, trees—but the atmosphere is charged with a dense and unnerving layering of time and contextual authority, what Aipperspach calls the “visual battery” inherent in painting. The imagery is lush but the composition possesses a difficult harmony, unsettling the viewer as they work to visually reconcile each part of what they are seeing. One result is the beguiling friction the New York Times art challenge lacks, small disturbances of interpretation causing generative cycles of narrative building and revisioning.

The trompe l’oeil paintings (whose trompe l’oeil quality might initially be missed, being trompe l’oeil paintings of other, framed paintings) are the clearest use of such dense and subtle weaving. The base are images employing the spatial conventions of historical landscape painting, verdant marshes warmed by a bucolic light, the kind of glow meant to summon what is now an outdated sense of the sublime. But the past light is cut with present shadows—window sashes, human profiles, the shapes of noses and hair belonging to someone who is not the viewer, present but unseen. The context of the painting shifts, no longer depicting the outdoors, but an interior, the shadow extending onto an oil-and-canvas frame. But the viewer’s knowledge is incomplete, leaving an implied narrative built out of questions and voids instead of actors or other grounding markers of storytelling. The “naturalness” of the landscape, the warmth of the “real” exterior light, is in fact part of another creation, the product of conventions that the Impressionists and other 19th century painters decided were attributes of beautiful landscapes. While the bluish glow in the corner of Landscape (7) can only come from a screen, reading as “artificial” to the eye, it is more a part of the work’s contextual present, more “real” ultimately, than the light of the painting within the painting.

The question of how human culture interprets or uses nature stretches across the different styles and modes of Aipperspach’s work. The most recent sundials take an element from an earlier series but removes the objects from their context and therefore their purpose; the sundials can no longer tell time without natural light, and in the unearthly glow of some unknown interior, they become spare, alien objects. An ancient technology used to parcel the sun into the manmade invention of hours, sundials are associated with gardens, faux-natural spaces mimicking wilderness for outdoor pleasure seekers who want their nature tamed. Inside, however, it can no longer extract units of measurement out of the environment, and becomes instead the focus of study, our own methods of extracting and measuring coming under scrutiny. Under such pressure, the sundial becomes uncommon and uncanny.

While the large tree paintings appear to be the most straightforward, the least “tricky,” the images are charged with their meticulous and layered creation. Aipperspach forms the paintings from smaller, on-site studies, made quickly outdoors at the whims of weather conditions and light. Gathering visual information from direct observation, he brings the studies into the studio and transforms them into large works, built from what he’s recorded on canvas and recollected from hours of staying with the same scene. The result is more rounded and precise than if taken from a digital image, which would capture only a single point in time. Instead, the multiple days spent on site directly feed the painting’s creation. Intentionally rough marks signal, like the light of the trompe l’oeils, a sense of painterly romance and pastiche, while the sharp raindrops streak across in a permanent present. The tape measurer adds another layer of mystery, not just in its purpose but in its more clean and realistic presentation, creating tension for the eye as it tries to reconcile the multiple realities implied by different kinds of representation. The effort to make visual sense of the world, and the ways Aipperspach makes such internal agreement subtly impossible, build an innate resistance that holds the viewer’s gaze in place. No person is present, but a presence exists, either a consciousness from the past, in the case of the historical landscapes, or one planning, perhaps, for a future, like with the measuring tape. But the viewer has only the present moment, feeling the hints of another person, each work occupied by a kind of temporal haunting.