“I like painting, I think there’s magic in painting.”

Abandoning more conceptual imagery in favor of simplicity, Night Light serves as a refinement to Dylan Kraus’ exploration of time and symmetry. These eight new paintings encapsulate dreamscapes and night visions, where a microcosm of birds and berries expands into images of the cosmos and the aurora borealis. Though intimate in scale, Kraus’ paintings draw inspiration from the infinite complexity of nature; a language of different shapes, sounds and forms that in turn create a spiritual atmosphere. Similar to a fable or fairytale, Kraus’ work aims to develop an emotional relation to the viewer through its hidden symbols and narratives. While his last series of clock paintings seem vastly different in terms of subject matter, Kraus views his practice as an ongoing study on themes of symmetry, the organic, the systematic, dreamtime and states of perception. The series was made on a porch in open air, and the show is aptly accompanied by field recordings of a summer night.

Following a long tradition of nature in art, Kraus cites German Expressionism and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group of the early twentieth century. The latter were brought together after the industrial revolution by a common desire to express spirituality through art. The rapid development of communications technology in the last twenty years has been described as an industrial revolution in itself, and Kraus feels a strong relation to spirit of the Blue Rider artists in that sense. His paintings could be viewed as a contemporary analog to what artists like Franz Marc and August Macke had begun to express right before the start of World War I.

Dylan Kraus (b. 1987, Ohio) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York. Kraus graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cooper Union in 2015. Recent exhibitions include: Sleeping in the Skin of a Nightmare, curated by Dylan Kraus and Aurel Schmidt, Romeo Gallery, New York; The Skies and the Atmosphere Most Luscious, curated by Dylan Kraus, James Fuentes, New York; The Written Trace, curated by Ariella Wolens, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; Over The Honey Moon (with Rose Salane), Magic Gallery, New York; Old School of Art: Tales from the Crypt, Cooper Union, New York; In Bloom, curated by Dylan Kraus, Chinatown Soup Gallery, New York; 12 Clox, Vision Inc., New York; Enter the Void, The Porch Museum, New York).

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