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And

And was a solo exhibition of Chevska’s paintings at the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, which was curated by its director Martin Müller. Chevska exhibited eight recent ‘word paintings’ and ten pieces from a new series of abstract canvases entitled Aside 1-10. The focus of the underlying research toward the show was an analysis of the unity of painting through an examination of three constituent components: objecthood, linguistic proposition and mark-making.

The exhibition brought together and held in balance the textual elements in Chevska’s work with newer gestural paintings. The ‘word paintings’ are text materialised in paint: a ground of oil paint covers raised words, which are then brought back to visibility by the drag of a brushstroke over the surface. In order to examine the relationship between the textual and the gestural within the medium of painting, Chevska radically fragmented lines from Anna Akhmatova’s poem Anno Domini 1921, sometimes placing just one word, such as ‘And’, on a large-scale canvas. In contrast the gestural Aside 1-10 paintings do not contain words, but a language of marks that generate ambiguous spatial tensions.

The individual paintings were not presented as self-contained entities; instead, the two groups of paintings were placed in a productive relationship to each other, allowing the artist to explore the complex entwinement of language, painting and abstraction. One word piece consisted of a series of six small paintings intended to be viewed/read together yet hung apart on a wall; as with the other ‘word paintings’, these could also be described as ‘concrete poems’.

The ‘word paintings’ were included in an Arts Council England-funded anthology of language art The Dark Would (Apple Pie Publishing ISBN 978-1909388000) and a word/image project for the journal Asymptote (published May 2013).