Jenny Walty

This was was the opening of the art season in New York, which means zillions of exhibition openings all over the city. I am usually too busy with Open Ground at this time of year to go up to Chelsea and even around Wburg, but this year is different.

I went to Chelsea on Thursday to see Adam Cvijanovic at Bellwether, and a few others. I really love Adam's painting style, I've always felt that he's the best artist in the gallery. Visiting his studio last fall confirmed my admiration, providing insight into his process and how the paintings are made. I started to think about his subject matter in relation to his material and was impressed to discover a very rich relationship.

Adam paints on Tyvek, the material used for FedEx envelopes and construction. It's incredibly strong, light and flexible, and is somehow permeable to moisture but not air. He has developed a specific acrylic paint blend to match tyvek's flexibility and is able to treat the paintings themselves with some abandon, throwing them on the floor, pinning them up with pushpins, rolling them up and generally abusing them to a certain extent. Whe they are installed they are smoothly adhered to the wall using wallpaper paste. When the show is over, he sponges the front of the painting and the moisture travels through the tyvek to dampen the wallpaper paste and remove the panel. It's an ingenious way for the paintings to become part of the architecture yet remaining works of art that can be easily reinstalled and sold.

His subject matter has included icebergs, a summer beach scene with crowds of people, and the littered woods near suburban housing. His new show is called "Love Poem (Ten Minutes After the End of Gravity)" and it depicts SoCal houses, palm trees, cars, and other suburban stuff falling apart and floating away into the sky after the force of gravity mysteriously disapears. This is especially poignant in this moment of disaster on the Gulf coast, but Adam told me he has been working on this mural for the last year.

Adam's paintings dipict moments of impermanence: the icebergs are melting, the woods are being used up, the people will leave the beach and it will become cold. The world is a fragile place that we impact with every scrap of trash; everything we touch is processed, packaged, and shipped around the world, and we must imagine the carbon fuel burnt in our name even if we never set foot in a car. Our civilization is based on the abundance of nature, we rely on grand forces we cannot control. If the forces we depend on were suddenly to change we would be hard pressed to adapt.

Yet his paintings tell us we must. While their subject matter is, in a way, ephemeral, the physical paintings are durable and may last millenia. They are flexible, they can exist anywhere, adapt to any surface. The paintings are a reaction to the fleeting scenes they depict, they embody a lesson.