I as soon as rummaged by a considerably obscure cabinet in my house and found what was once a bag of potatoes. These uncared for tubers had wrestled tender fuschia shoots by their mesh container, looking for a nutrient supply. I felt like a monster. They wished so badly and had labored so onerous to stay, and I hadn’t thought of them for a millisecond. There was an excessive amount of to cope with, all the time an excessive amount of.
David Kennedy Cutler, “Snake I” (2025), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
Cutler excavates from his canvases extra layers than they need to include. In “Snake I” (2025), depicting a snake plant, as an illustration, there’s the usual floor wherein paint creates the phantasm of depth. However then there’s clean canvas each behind and “in front of” the topic within the type of ripped-off slices of the plant pot; a light-weight pastel-gray layer of shadow that subtly means that we’re trying right into a non-Euclidean house; and cut-out items of canvas that reveal a layer of inkjet switch and paint beneath and create one more visible stage by way of painted undersides that snake upward previous the bounds of the canvas. This prompts the wall behind the portray as one more layer within the type of a shadow. Phew.
As that description suggests, these works are virtually unimaginable to make sense of. Making an attempt to observe the road of a leaf seems like shedding one’s place in a line of textual content or practice of thought: You backtrack, strive once more, lose it once more. It seems like peering right into a world with extra superior physics than yours, like your imaginative and prescient is splintering, your thoughts stuttering. If Cubism breaks up objects to reassemble them from a number of views, we’d name Cutler’s mission a type of hypercubism, to borrow a time period from arithmetic — a Cubism for the twenty first century.
David Kennedy Cutler, “Stoppage” (2025), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
“Stoppage” (2025), as an illustration, suggests to me a stool falling whereas dramatically tossing up a vase that presumably sat upon it, scattering its flowers. Wood stool legs and plant stalks chaotically interlace and even seem to grow to be each other. Totally different temporalities are caked collectively: The stool appears to spin because it falls, and the flowers vary from tight buds to full bloom.
Crops, flowers, and sure, potatoes discover their means into many works on this present. However slightly than specific ecocriticism, Cutler’s invocation of nature feels extra like a gesture towards this sense of bursting too-muchness by way of dwelling issues, that are nearer to us — I undoubtedly felt worse for the straining potatoes, as an illustration, than the equally deserted bag that contained them. Certainly, I’d go as far as to counsel that works like “Fiction” (2025) — wherein lavender tulips each burst upward and sag downward from a bag containing a multi-headed wine bottle — are virtually gory. From one aspect, the bag is unzipped to disclose a wood armature that recollects an uncovered backbone; it appears to be from this useless matter that these flowers blossom.
These works are inherently anxious, however “Bed” (2022) would possibly make that dread most manifest. In it, surplus items of a steel mattress body pierce by the mattress, seeming to shoot out the orange bedspread’s ornamental suns; these coronas float aimlessly round like mud mites, haunting your house of relaxation like a unfastened id, like shattered items of your stressed thoughts. How can we stay like this? The middle, Cutler appears to counsel, can’t maintain.
David Kennedy Cutler, “Bed” (2022), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
David Kennedy Cutler, “Meteorite II” (2024), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
Two views of David Kennedy Cutler, “Pillow” (2025), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire, wooden, zippers (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
David Kennedy Cutler, “Ensemble III” (2025), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
David Kennedy Cutler, “Goodbye Flowers” (2025), inkjet switch, acrylic and clear coat on canvas, armature wire (photograph by Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York)
David Kennedy Cutler: Second Nature continues at Derek Eller Gallery (38 Walker Road, Floor Ground, Tribeca, Manhattan) by April 12. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
