Jennifer Landes on Kevin Teare’s ‘L’Ecole Horizontale’ at Harper’s

East Hampton Star, December 2020

Kevin Teare’s L’Ecole Horizontale exhibition at Harper’s Books in East Hampton is dislocating in a number of ways. Instead of alienating the viewer, however, it serves as a reassuring reflection of our times and a way to reorder the chaos in our midst.

Calling the works ‘paintings’ feels like a disservice to them. It’s not the medium that is the star, rather it is an embellishment of a support that incorporates horizontal layers of latticed wood and mortar. The resulting compositions cannot have one without the other, but the latter elements are what make them memorable.

Inspired by a trip to New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in 1974, Mr. Teare took the exposed mortar and lathe plaster walls he saw in artists’ lofts as a springboard for his imagination. Back home in Indiana, he began appropriating the materials and visual sensibility conceived in the preceding decade. Yet from looking at the art he made, it was clear he was already searching for more elaborate means of expression.

Sensing it was no longer enough merely to adopt industrial materials or work geometrically in purely sculptural or two-dimensional forms, it appears he appropriately caught the transformation taking place at the moment in the work of Minimalists. Then he made it his own.

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