In his new solo exhibition, “Lonesome,” on view at TOPS Gallery through May 7th, the Los Angeles-based painter Adam Higgins throws a small tantrum about mindfulness. The tantrum takes the form of light purple lettering, inscribed backwards around the border of an oil painting of tumultuous water merging with sand. The lettering reads, “EYE CANT STOP THE WAVES AND EYE DONT KNOW HOW TO SURF,” a riff on the well-known mindful refrain of you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.
Higgins’ paintings could easily be misinterpreted as being concerned with a perpetually present moment. His minutely detailed depictions of sea and sand and wildlife meld into abstracted fields of dots, suggesting a meditative process. But the paintings in “Lonesome” are hardly zen. Both their subject matter and formal qualities hang at the frustrated edge of abstraction and realism, the visible and invisible, figure and ground, and of life and death.
Higgins, who was born in California but raised in Tennessee, received a BFA from Memphis College of Art in 2012 and an MFA in painting from Yale in 2018. As a younger artist, he gravitated toward the inward-gazing abstract paintings of artists like Agnes Martin and Forrest Bess. His more recent works are abstract in the sense that they are unconcerned with any objective reality, but they engage photography as a reference and counterpose realist and abstract techniques. Higgins’ first solo show in LA featured paintings of California halibut, a flat fish that camouflages itself in the sand; thin shadows separate speckled flat fish from equally flattened grounds. In these works, Higgins attempted a visual double-entendre by flattening a fish that is already trying to flatten itself by making combinations of flat marks. A living fish becomes the ground, becomes a photo, which becomes a painting, then emerges to the viewer as a fish again, or at least the idea of one.
“Lonesome” extends Higgins’ concern with this ontological gray territory, but the series of paintings is less unified in terms of subject matter. The exhibition is organized less like a single proposition and more like a poem. To make the paintings in the show — five of which hang at TOPS main gallery (at 400 South Front) and an additional three of which in a new storefront window-style gallery at Madison Avenue Park at 151 Madison Avenue — Higgins worked from snapshots he took wandering the beaches near his home. For the triad of paintings in the park, he photographed moths that landed on the window of his studio at night. Only one painting, of a poodle lying prone on a sea of purple, departs from this theme. The poodle painting, “standard poodle,” is arranged in a visual couplet with the painting of sand and sea. Around its edge, a mirror ring of text, “YOU CAN’T STOP THE WAVES AND YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO SURF,” leaves an open question: Is Higgins accusing the viewer of similar inability to achieve a state of mindfulness? Or is the painting a self-indictment, a way of reminding himself to stop faking a meditative nature painter schtick? It is hard to tell whether the poodle is playing or terrified.
Higgins’ strength as a painter shows when he leans into a challenge. Sand is a nearly impossible subject for a painting because it is simultaneously indivisible and made of infinite parts, at once every color and no color at all. Higgins’ painting hidden surf perch with line attempts the impossible by showing the sand as a penumbra of abstracted color around the disappearing edge of a perch and the thin record of a fishing line. In “mussel rock,” a foreground of spotted rock and background or grass and surf feel oddly flipped; it is hard to tell what is near and far. Higgins’ triad of nocturne paintings of moths vacillate between hyper-visible descriptions of the insects and dark abstracted backgrounds, an effect that makes them appear more graphic than the other work, perhaps to a fault. Another painting, dead seagull with live walleye surf perch, is violently bright and somehow the light appears reflective, the way it does on an actual beach.
If the job of science has been to divide up nature into the smallest possible parts, the job of painting might be to recompose it as whole. Impossible, of course — the best a painter can do is show the moment when the fish, the sand, the moth, or the wave disappears from view. Higgins’ “Lonesome” succeeds because it manages to hint at an edge of violence in this shifting terrain of becoming and unbecoming without overexposure.
Artist talk this Saturday, April 30, 4-6 p.m. Adam Higgins’ “Lonesome” is on view at TOPS Gallery through May 7th. TOPS is at 400 South Front, and Madison Avenue Park is at 151 Madison Avenue.