Both vibrant in color and visceral in texture, Evan Nesbit, now at Roberts Projects in Culver City here works on burlap, a continuation of the artist’s use of materials to pull viewers into the depths of his vivid palette. Nesbit’s abstract works deal in illusion, creating images that heighten the senses, taking the viewer into abstract images that are like pieces of puzzles or a kaleidoscope image that has not yet spun into a traditional shape.

Playing off his textures with color and color with texture, his works of material-based abstraction have a boundless glow, as the artist continues his passion for capturing the sensation light and space, and teasing with illusory shapes. His palette is somehow both muted and bold, and add to an oddly off-kilter sensation in the artist’s latest body of work. Also predominant is burlap itself, the texture on which the artist riffs so fully that the viewer will remember it as if they had touched it rather than viewed it.

Evan Nesbit, “Pink Continuance.” Courtesy of Roberts Projects.

In “Pink Continuance Against Various Super-Units,” thick, cross hatched lines seemingly swim across a sea of pinks and golds and blues. The lines are wavering, as if they were billowing in an unseen breeze. Acrylic and dye on burlap, the image is buoyant, suspended in space and time, as if the artist had held his breath in creating it. 

Using acrylic, ink, and dye on burlap, “Attachment Measures” resembles land masses floating on a loose, fine-lined grid. Blue, green, yellow, black, and a salmon-shade of pink are the colors used in these uneven shapes. The seemingly torn edges of these masses evoke the idea of the natural world, not just a depiction of it. The work evokes a strangely poignant sense of loss, as if fragments of a map, or fragments of meaning, were about to drift away.

Evan Nesbit, ‘Attachment Measures.” Courtesy of Roberts Projects.

“What the Sun Said Inside a Cardboard Box” appears as a box within a box, dappled with sunspots or colorful dust motes, or perhaps representing what you see when you close your eyes after looking at the sun.  A rich purple-blue square encased in a burnished orange and gold one, the image has a surprising amount of depth, as if the viewer could slip inside the titular box. Like bubbles in two green rectangular shapes, “Yuba Fizz” also uses circular patterns that appear wet and transient, as if they could bubble up and slip away, dissolve from the speckled surface. “Wind Eye – Color Grid 1” again approximates a fabric sailing in the wind, rippled outward, like a thin quilt strung on a line.

Between color and context, Nesbit’s works dazzle with their captured sense of motion and immediacy. Contact Roberts Projects to view these layered, lustrous, and almost gravity-defying works.