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Jarvis Art is pleased to present Daniel Licht’s debut New York solo exhibition, Eight Paintings. The show consists of a suite of abstract paintings made over the past year through a rigorous process of accumulation and erasure. Each painting spans four adjoined wooden panels, creating horizontal fields in which oil and wax are built up and scraped away until only essential marks remain. Licht’s approach is fundamentally existential; these works express moments of emotional intensity in which specific atmospheres are transcribed.
The paintings begin with images found online, often from Wikipedia, that instinctively resonate with the artist. Licht builds up layers of paint to form a representation of the source image, then uses various tools to scrape much of this away. This process of removal becomes a form of strange archaeology: as each painting develops, the original image dissipates, leaving behind a residue of feeling in a palimpsest of marks. He has described paring down each work until “almost only bones remain.”
Licht refers to these four-panel structures as “quartets,” emphasizing their temporal dimension. He works separately on each panel, removed from the whole, with no mark extending beyond its own boundary. He uses organic pigments and binders, eschewing synthetic media entirely. Each painting unfolds like a sentence, with periods and emphases that invoke patterns of speech.
The ninth element in the exhibition is Hymn (I drew him from the water), a drawing for the larger painting Hymn. Both works take inspiration from Bernaert de Rijckere’s 1556 painting Moses Saved From the Waters, which depicts the biblical story of Pharaoh’s daughter discovering infant Moses in the River Nile. In recent years, Licht has become fascinated by this story’s paradox: Moses is saved from drowning only to become the agent of Egypt’s undoing. Licht’s work becomes a meditation on salvation and destruction.
While creating this body of work, the artist learned that Moses is said to have had a stutter, which generated an interest in how certain kinds of meaning can emerge only from the struggle with expression itself. Licht’s work mediates a space between speech and silence, making and unmaking. Reinforcing the sense of accumulation and erasure, Liar—which appeared in the gallery’s preceding group exhibition—remains on view.
Eight Paintings considers the ways in which painting can represent fundamental truths that remain beyond the reach of more direct conceptual and linguistic means.
Daniel Licht (b. 1996, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York City. Recent exhibitions include Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles; Ninetto, Athens; Samuele Visentin, London; and Studio Jones, New York. Licht’s writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail and The Midway Review. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago (BA, 2018) and painting at the New York Studio School (MFA, 2023), where he currently teaches.