Val Kessler, "8 yachts (in nein achts)" April 5- May 5 2024
opening
Friday April 5, 6-9pm

Val Kessler: “8 yachts (in nein achts)” April 5- May 5, 2024

Redundant Beach

211 SE Madison St. Unit B28 (basement) Portland, OR 97214 theredundantbeach.com

 

Artist’s Statement

The eight yachts have to do with naming and poetry. On the one hand, there’s something absurd about a show featuring eight yachts, and that immediately registers as a sense of uncanniness. Who would paint eight yachts? It is so superfluous and so hedonistic to have eight yachts. How much money would it take to purchase eight yachts?

What is the relationship between the eight yachts paintings and eight yachts?

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The impetus for the show comes from a rhyme, which goes like this: “eight yachts in nein achts, I yachats, I make hat.” When you think about the yachts in this way, their largesse is compressed. Eight Yachts in “zero” (nein) eights embeds the empty consumption within the grand structure that defines the absurdly expensive leisure boat known as the yacht.

Consumption is also reflected in the throat-clearing German word acht. You have just consumed or “eight” a yacht and are regurgitating it. It gets stuck in your throat.

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There is also an art market reflexive element to these paintings as they accrete in value, one day perhaps even eclipsing that of a yacht.

 

The other interesting thing about eight yachts in nein achts Is that the number eight is made by stacking two zeros on top of one another in a manner that appears like a moon, reflecting itself on the horizon of a body of water.

Finally, the nein achts offers a pataphysical organization to the series paintings. Nine acts of eating yachts are shown with the intrigue, humor, and drama of a Shakespearean play.

This high drama is seen in the imagery of the paintings, which slide from overt maritime themes to covert ones. Courbet’s The Wrestlers and another renaissance painting in which the woman is clearly made to appear masculine becomes Yacht 3: a sailor orgy.

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Yacht one features a scene reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s painting “boating.” Whereas Richter used found flea market photographs, this image is drawn from a still taken from an infamous YouTube video of a boating accident. My goal was to capture the yachting mentality in this group. Just after this moment, they will be slammed against the sides of the boat. The water serves to remind them who is in charge, just as geopolitics one day will for the owners of yachts.

It is worth remembering that this is “8 yachts (in nein achts) which is to say there are no yachts.