Ethan Means

How do you say spliff in french? On this day, nothing new happened. A group of angelic trouble makers just had a paranormal experience. I just want to quickly address the hubris of man. Out of the blue nowhere.

I think it was just the gentle breeze or something. Check first with numbers then double check with intuition. Take a line for a walk. Even abstract shapes must have a likeness.

Entrance is pleased to present Something Gardens. The debut solo presentation of new paintings by Ethan Means. Something funny, something menacing. Something heard. Something that should not have been forgotten.

The D to the b41. Or maybe the b61 to the b103. Or what about

just taking the F all the way and walking forty minutes. Ethan’s paintings reveal his multi-sensory relationship to his environment.

New developments ensue as you watch. The closer you might look. Unfolding and musical. He leaves points of recognition and clouds of obfuscating smoke. Actively pushing and pulling moments of clarity and opacity. Pointing in misguiding directions by means of honest

intentions.

The people and places in his paintings are real but they do not exist. They are diagrams or metaphors. Built up and erased with oil paint. Many times a painting begins with a false start, only to provide a lead or insight into the next development. These paintings are sweated over, tossed around, physical works of art. His handling of the paint is a subject of its own. Layer after layer, thinly veiled. Instilled with a sordid past. A texture only a surface worked over and over could achieve.

Something Gardens? The idea of a setting is pervasive and elastic. Stretching as far as the foreground and frame. Flatbush Gardens? Prospect Lefferts gardens? The center of Brooklyn. By the park, Something Gardens.

—Ethan Kramer

Ethan Means (b. 2001, New York City) is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Means is a graduate of The Cooper Union. He currently shares a studio with artist Ethan Kramer in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with whom he had a duo show at Entrance in 2023. Something Gardens is his debut solo exhibition, with a focus on his practice in oil painting.