Adam Hayes: The room had an imposing dominance over the man

October 19 – November 24, 2013

Adam Hayes negotiates the common memory that is history through his new body of work. His angle of approach varies through the use of line, text and physical materials, but each points to the same question of what does it mean to be attracted to the trappings of grandeur at a depth beyond consciousness. To exist in a state of need, filled with desires unrealizable. This point renders to a place where action is impossible; emotion flows through Möbius like paths allowing only for vistas without any notion of connection.

Hayes’s drawings carefully elucidate scenes stroke by stroke. Constructed in a manner that always reminds us that we are looking at parts, even as the subject itself sparks to life. Not unlike the work of the late Robert Heinecken who transformed common magazine pages into questions—largely the means is interchangeable and cycles in phases with the end. Fashioned through the most fundamental of artistic modes, Rodinesque figures loon over the fading remains of what were once possibly great halls occupied by a ruling few Each asking us to negotiate the legacy of power and it spoils through the almost unreachable fade of time.

Echoing his work with line and form on paper, Hayes’s written series presents a selection of abstractly recognizable directions. Each builds a visceral scene of light and shadow populated by an undifferentiated cast. The iterations are interstitial, operatic and silent. In a state of near motionless, we voyeuristically watch the figures move through their program as we fill our lungs with the thick air that surrounds us all.

- David Andrew Ferry, New York, October 2013