Chris Kahler American, b. 1969

Chris Kahler’s paintings and aqueous medium drawings are, collectively, intensely hued rapture. The artist describes his endeavor as one of relating biomorphic forms to the ephemeral, but shape does not constitute time. What he means, I think, is a matter of reverie more than form, of associations that come and go while contemplating artworks in which the accidental, the chemical, and the phenomenal, seem to occlude such acculturated references as taxonomy, inscription, or mapping.

Putting such constructs into the shadows, though, is not to eliminate them entirely from mind. The rhapsodic play of color and viscous traces in Kahler’s work are a result of its working conditions as well as the sum of its effects. These works are painted flat; that is, on table or floor, and this orientation is critical. We know the map is not the territory, but every map brings us to its spatiality from above. In this art understanding its orientation is a means to recognize the movement of the eye as a disembodied form of wandering through its chromatic territory.

Chris Kahler is the Department Chair and Professor of Painting and Drawing at Eastern Illinois University. He received his B.F.A. at Ohio Wesleyan University and M.F.A. from Northwestern University, Chicago, IL. Kahler has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions at venues including the Richard Ross Art Museum, Delaware, OH (2014); Anita Wooten Gallery, Valencia College, Orlando, FL (2011); John P. Weatherhead Gallery, University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, IN (2009); Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, IL (2002).