Charles Mayton

David Lewis is pleased to present Androiid, a solo presentation of recent work by Charles Mayton. This exhibition comprises a group of thirty-one paintings made over the last year.

Throughout the past decade Mayton has wrestled with the constructs of painting, shying away from the formulation of an individualized style, and instead interrogated the ruptures and disruptions inherent to painting’s history (and to the contemporary crisis of image-culture). This has meant that Mayton's work has dealt self-consciously with varying themes, citations and procedures; the artist articulated a stylistically and iconographically de-centered practice. This project was described insightfully by Amy Sillman in a 2015 catalog essay: “Maybe Mayton’s greatest question is, what if, as Lacan suggests, the unconscious is structured like a language, but you can’t speak the language? What if your unconscious speaks in tongues? Can painting be a place of not-knowing, of thwarted efficiency...? I think this is the thwarting that Charles Mayton is after.”

In the current exhibition Androiid, Mayton has developed this practice by—perhaps paradoxically, or mysteriously—making a series of paintings of urban, rural, and suburban locales. These intimate works are constructed based on digital snapshots taken throughout the year and constitute a timeline which cuts across differing sites and terrains, each conveying a suggestive mood or perhaps a time of day. Mayton observationally painted each work from the screen of his phone. In doing so there is information that is lost, edited, exaggerated, and abstracted in each translation. The mood is evocative of a poetic and personal American landscape tradition—Burchfield, Hopper, etc.—but the structure (the pictorial and signifying engine) derives from the artist’s study of the painterly semiotics. These emptied landscapes are meditations on the nature of painting; they are haunted (by absence), visions of a world seen by Mayton after a decade-plus interrogation of the history of the medium and the elusive nature of signs.