JOEL WERRING
DEAR COYOTE

MARCH 3 - APRIL 21, 2023

I was recently looking at Joel Werring’s new paintings and drawings. This beautiful series employs a limited palette and strongly emphasizes structure, surface, and mark-making. Werring’s decision to pare down his materials allows us to easily follow his process of juxtaposing visual elements within a single picture until he arrives at formal and narrative connections that are both surprising and sophisticated. These works freely combine images taken from art history with powerful abstract gestures, as well as tender renderings of objects that Joel draws from direct observation. And in the majority of these new pictures, we are presented with images of wild animals such as coyotes, crows, wolves, and deer. 

 
Thinking about Joel’s work, I initiated the following conversation with my five-year-old son: 

   Where do birds live?  Mostly the sky. 

   Where do deer live?  The forest. 

   And Frogs?  In the land and water. 

   And where do humans live?  On the ground. 
 
This final answer struck me as unusual, if not altogether different. With each previous question that I posed, my son’s answer would place animals in their respective habitats. But the ground isn’t exactly a home, it’s more a location and even an implication of time. The ground is where you find your feet at any given moment ­­-- it is the here and the now. But unlike almost any other living organism, humans do not have a single natural domain. While in one sense this makes us free, it also renders us without a true home -- and with unlimited freedom comes nearly as many questions.  Who are we? What is our place? What are we here to do? And what does this all mean? 
 
I believe that Werring’s art is born from similar questions and is fueled by the curiosity, awe, and beautiful confusion that accompanies consciousness. In order to ponder his own questions, Joel looks at the world through the eyes of a painter, an architect, a poet, and a naturalist. Thus, in this single body of work, we find a simple bird house contending with majestic 15thcentury Italian architecture, or even a humble fence-like structure crafted of found timber. In one work we see Joel sensitively describing light dancing on the surface of a pond and in another he is deftly harnessing perspective to account for the distance between his window and the city center. Regardless of the particular subject being described, Werring is deeply committed to the very act of locating, looking, and ultimately drawing. This is the unshakable core of his practice and allows him to constantly archive and examine the significant places, inhabitants, and forms that he experiences throughout his daily life. And it is within his paintings that Joel repurposes these visual elements and ultimately poses entirely new visual structures so that we may examine our human experience anew. In these drawings and paintings, no single form carries the story, but instead serves as a point within an ever-evolving constellation that becomes more tightly organized and connected with the viewer’s gaze.  
 
Joel’s art takes root in the external world and speaks to a vast range of accumulated experiences. And yet, all the while, these pictures reveal a steady and persistent artist in search of knowledge, meaning, and metaphor. For Werring, there seems to be no question a drawing cannot answer as long as he keeps his own eyes open and his feet on the ground.