Press Release
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the Landing is pleased to present Splitting Fog, Flowering Stone, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Dani Tull on view from January 21st to March 4th, 2023. Developing a method Tull describes as “narrative abstraction,” seventeen flashe on linen paintings probe the enduring flow of personal and collective memory through an exacting formal repertoire.

The paintings in Splitting Fog, Flowering Stone comprise bold, laborious linework backgrounded by dynamic swaths of color stained on raw linen canvas. Collections of thousands of hand-painted pinstripe lines congeal into what the artist calls “streams”. These multi-colored streams swirl across his surfaces until they gently fray at each end. Tull often paints the negative spaces produced between streams a solid color reflected in the linework; this motif, at times, leads viewers back to the surface of the painting, and at others, conjures voids or opaque portals to interminably deep space.

Surrounding the streams, Tull’s formal explorations of texture and color produce hypnotic disorientations of scale. The weave of the unprimed linen canvas is visible throughout the surfaces of each work, including in sections that have been stained with bleeding washes of color. While the linen’s textural intensity gives viewers the sense that they are viewing something up close, the washes of color feel more distant and protean.

Emerging before their mesmerizing backdrops, Tull’s streams resemble light trails produced by shooting stars and other celestial forms. Like stars, which take many light years to travel to our eyes, the past intermingles with the present, in Tull's work, as past memories irrupt into the present. Each painting’s color scheme derives “from a meaningful life experience, suspended on the surface like a trace artifact,” per the artist. In Splitting Fog, Flowering Stone, Tull pulls colors from memories such as eating a seasonal mamey fruit, a particularly spectacular sunset, the colors of a loved one's eyes, and his grandfather’s favorite shirt. Tull has also pulled color palettes from his own past works and art made by family members and artists he admires. The duration of time required in recollecting these events and objects becomes reflected on the paintings’ surfaces.

More than in previous bodies of work, the paintings in Splitting Fog, Flowering Stone are responsive to a specific time and place in the artist’s life. Conceived of, and largely executed while working in Mérida, Mexico – a city in the Yucatan with colonial history, surrounded by jungle and Mayan ruins – the paintings serve as vessels for personal and communal memory rooted in the region. Underneath the vibrantly painted streams of color, streams of texts flow across Tull’s surfaces. “Within my process,” says Tull, “the white gessoed underpainting presents a tabula rasa (clean slate) upon which I inscribe the surface with personal texts, poetry by various writers, as well as written contributions from friends and family members.” For Splitting Fog, Flowering Stone, Tull called upon the community of friends, artists, and poets he cultivated in Mérida to produce the texts that flow within each work. Many of his collaborators hand-wrote their poems, prose, and missives on the paintings themselves. Though these texts are largely obscured—or protected—by the final layer of flashe paint, fragmented words peek through along the streams like fish jumping out from a current.

Language and memory are not only materially embedded within the streams like a palimpsest; they also serve as a guide in the creation of the abstract compositions. Within Tull’s practice, he draws a series of lines on gessoed surfaces that serve to guide the movement of his hand as he begins to paint the streams line by line – an arduous, time-consuming, and meditative process. He maintains the width of each stream with a bespoke ruler that measures intervals with letters rather than numbers. Language, therefore, becomes a unit of measurement, an underlying logic that structures the abstract flow of form.

There seems to be an internal, atmospheric force, like gravity, operating within the works, as Tull’s long, painted lines nestle tightly against one another while unfurling across his canvases. Tull captures the constant flux of transformation as it crystallizes into elegant, intermingling forms. As he describes, “the forms in my paintings lean, support, navigate the space and negotiate complex relationships with each other, much like organic lifeforms or even the dynamics of human interrelations.” The artist understands these groupings of fluctuating lines as “self-correcting forms always striving toward equilibrium while arching against collapse,” though what that equilibrium might look like is never fully realized. Instead, the compositions capture the “striving” flow of material in the process of transformation, as though the abstractions were actually representations of some sub-atomic structure, revealing the everlasting movement that undergirds even the most seemingly static forms.

Biography

Dani Tull (b. 1966) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include: Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles, CA; Kim Light Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam, NL; Wewerka, Berlin, DE; On Stellar Rays, New York, NY; Jacob Lewis Gallery, New York, NY; and LAM Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Permanent collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA, The Getty, CA; The Laguna Art Museum, CA; and The Peter Norton Family Collection.

Tull’s work has been covered by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, I.D. Magazine, Art Review, Wallpaper magazine and Frieze, among others, and he is the recipient of a 2022 Gottlieb Foundation artist grant. During his career, Tull has collaborated with a variety of internationally recognized artists such as Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon. As an accomplished musician and composer, he has recorded and performed with a great variety of musicians. Recent musical projects include solo performances for SASSAS, West Of Rome and LAFMS.