Impersonal Spaces

Years ago, painter Eric Hesse would commute to work within Los Angeles. His home and studio were 5 miles apart, but it would take 30 minutes or more in LA traffic to get to either place.

- Eric Hesse

Certainly other commuters had longer drives, but Hesse was confounded by the small distance he had to go and the time it was taking him to get there. “My way of coping was to stare at the underpasses as I went through them,” he says. “It was me interacting in a very personal way to a very impersonal city.”

Hesse, who has since moved within Los Angeles and now has a studio across the street from his home, has turned the impersonal spaces within one of the largest cities in the world into his next batch of work in Almost Not There, a new show now up at George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles.

“Bound more by theme than motif, the work in this exhibit skitters on the line between presence and absence. Walls, water, brick and metal, atmosphere and mountain, each is set up to pique with strangeness and inevitability,” he says. “Exploring the magic of contradictions, the subjects are simultaneously tenuous and formidable, inviting and frank, and a wry retort to a question. ‘Are we almost there?’ No, we are almost not there.”