Rhys Coren

Foreign & Domestic is delighted to present Rhys Coren’s solo exhibition Falling Up, showing nine new paintings created with Coren’s unique method of laser-cut and spray-painted marquetry. Falling Up is Coren’s second solo exhibition in New York, and first time showing work in the city since 2019.

Coren’s painting process alternates between multiple analog and digital stages. He first draws freely with pen or pencil on paper, working in a flow state and often accompanied by music. These drawings are scanned and digitized, then layered, stretched, cropped, collaged and filled in with color in a scale-free digital space, combining an intuitive working process with an analytical editorial mode. The third phase sees the digital files printed out, cut up and drawn over by hand. Drawings created at very different times are mixed and mashed together. These printed images are scanned and digitized a second time; lines are traced and vectorized, then fed into a laser cutter to cut all the graphic elements as individual parts, in wood or paper. Finally, these parts are spray painted in a finely-tuned process to obtain hue, tone and saturation, before being assembled into the final painting like a puzzle.

Coren’s workflow interweaves diverse modes of time, play and attention. Each work contains the immediacy of pencil drawing, the analytical distance of editing, the poetics of collage, the literacy of design, and the careful calibration of color. Coren in turn plays, prints, cuts, pastes, edits, filters, mixes, matches, zooms in and out, thinks, deletes, writes, draws and sprays, works fast, slow, vertical and horizontal. His paintings are sediments of different times in the artist’s life, moments in the day, seasons of life, snippets of songs, anecdotes, artistic and vernacular influences. They echo the delicate dance of face, hand, and body gestures that we all make in a hybrid world of digital and analog interfaces.

Coren’s paintings emulate contemporary music production, passing original recordings through filters, synthesizers and modules, combining and recombining inputs and outputs, sampling, mixing and mastering, to produce a track that is as much a product of the recording studio and the software suite as the instruments played. Visually and rhythmically, Coren’s paintings transmit electronic concepts of latency, frequency, compression, resolution, reverb and resonance. His paintings vibrate in the space between many dichotomies: virtual and tangible, intuition and chaos, fast and slow, signal and noise, poetry and process, motion and emotion, Apollonian and Dionysian.

Falling Up is a meditation on the composition of identity. The identity of an artwork, an artist or a person. The delicate equation of origins, influences, feedback loops, quotation and repetition, input and output that produces a distinct whole from disparate parts.

In the recent past Rhys Coren has been teaching animation to children in elementary school, designing stone furniture with Peter Noyce, and working on a major public art installation in London. These are the first paintings produced by Coren in over a year.

An extensive new interview of Rhys Coren, carried out by Christian Viveros-Fauné in December 2024, accompanies his exhibition.

A limited-edition artist publication produced with Rhys Coren will be released in late February.